This 2003 film could have been a perfectly decent romantic comedy with a strong female cast, a fine supporting performance from Shirley Maclaine, and Julia Stiles’s enormous, round head. Instead, the film’s ambition to document the story of an entire family, and its own obvious infatuation with its characters lead to too many scenes too many, unbalancing the narrative. Stiles’s quirky family and warm relations with her sisters are charming, but ultimately slow down what could have been an even more charming courtship with Alessandro Nivola. Ultimately, the film’s grand designs are responsible for its failure to move beyond the genre that it attempts to transcend. Still, points for making Nivola’s handsome and three-dimensional character Jewish.
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Fran said we had — and I quote here from her email — a “two scroll morning” so I will try to keep this relatively brief. I suppose I’ve known since I was a little kid that ‘torah’ means ‘instruction’. I think too often we are tempted to imagine this as ‘instruction’ as in ‘teachings’ or maybe ‘wisdom’ or ‘philosophy of life’. I love this parshah because it reminds us that torah means ‘instruction’ or maybe even ‘instructions’ — as in the elaborately folded piece of paper in the bottom of the box that your new blender came in.
Maybe it is because I have just moved into a new house and have been putting together a lot of furniture purchased from Target, but this parshah read to me like instructions: Step 25: Fasten end of cords to frames which have been attached to ephod. Step 26: Attach 2 gold rings to ends of inner edge of breastpiece, facing ephod. Step 27: Attach 2 remaining gold rings two bottom of breastpiece. Run blue cord through breastpiece, securing breastpiece to ephod. They say that being Jewish is doing Jewish, and no place is this more true than in this parshah tetsaveh.
In the section of this parshah on priestly garments which we didn’t hear this morning, god instructs the priests to wear a crown which says ‘holy to the lord’ on. I imagine this to be a bit like wearing a tshirt that says “property of the dallas cowboys” or, perhaps, “use by 6/5/2010″. I mean they labeled the high priest. I guess I understand why. I mean after all in the desert this was all new to people — they had a lot to learn. There was probably someone with sticky notes writing ’sorry — you can’t eat this anymore’ on all the newly-tref items in camp.
Speaking to Christian creationists who read the bible ‘literally’ Rabbi Johnathan Sacks pointed out that it takes god only 70 verses to create the entire universe, but 700 to create the ark. Which, then, is the more important topic? I like this parshah because it reminds us of the materiality and embodied nature of Judaism. A few weeks ago in church I sang a chant with the following lyrics: “be mindful lord of we who bear/the burden of the flesh we wear.” The burden of the flesh we wear: this image of pure souls trapped in prisons of corrupt flesh couldn’t be further from the world-affirming, world-embracing instruction book that is the torah. This is the religion where, when I asked my rabbi for advice before heading off to graduate school, he said “try to live at least a mile away from campus. That way you can walk to school and that will be your exercise”. Its the religion where, when Woody Allen asks his father if he’s no worried about the after life his father replies “when I die I’ll be unconscious. Why should I worry now for something I’ll be unconscious for later?” In a world for people who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” this is the religion which produced Rabbi Sacks, who insists — and this is one of my favorite lines from him — “ritual is for the soul what exercise is for the body”.
In fact, if I had to sum up the fundamental message of Rabbinic Judaism it would be: “come for the temple, stay for the halakhah”. In these post-temple times some might be tempted to look askance at parshyot about sacrifices and semen and blood and breastpieces and wonder why they are relevant. They are relevant because Judaism is, temple or no, a religion that recognizes the fact that we are bodies, living in this world: that it matters what we eat and how we eat it, who we sleep with and when, that eating meat entails spilling blood, that the mind is part of the body, not its opposite. It recognizes that the world is a confusing place, full of difficult decisions to be made with imperfect knowledge in uncertain conditions. Luckily, as this parshat demonstrates, Judaism teaches us that the best thing about this often-confusing world is that instructions are included. Shabbat shalom.
This text first appeared in excavations of Ugarit in 1962 with a colophon describing it as “‘A Hymn of Baal’s Victory Over The Silverfish”. It bears a resemblance to the ‘crushing of the crawlies’ texts first described by Charpin from Mari, and thus the theme is likely a common one in West Semitic culture. Although some have claimed to identify Qumran fragments that may be reworked versions of this hymn, no definitive texts have emerged
For AKMA, on the zither
How long must I wait oh lord, how long?
how long must I endure the attacks of my enemy?
My enemy hides in a dark place
from a secret place he plots against me
But there is no escape from the lord
the maker of light
Whose light shines everywhere
even the back of my book case
As I enter my office I see them scurrying in fear
hiding beneath the xeroxes
The spines of my books are chewed oh lord
the cover of my copy of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande
And I’m talking about a cloth first edition of the full version here
Strike them in your wrath oh lord,
smite them wherever they hide
Smear them as they attempt to wriggle under stacks of ungraded tests
smash those who dwell between the pages
Spare not the juveniles oh lord
the ones who will breed further
The large ones will be destroyed
and the small as well, no matter how hard they are to catch
The wrath of the lord makes the cedars of Lebanon bend
the anger of the lord causes the stacks to shake
It makes the reserve desk skip like a young calf
And the book-ends quiver and tang
But you shall not be angry at your servant lord
you will bless your servants who tend the dust jackets as you command
Fear of the lord is the end of silverfish
And we shall dwell in the house of the righteous forever
Selah!
I for one welcome my NPR overlords. I’ve held off commenting on NPR’s “Fifty Great Voices” series despite my obsession with the human voice because… well really because I didn’t care that much. I thought about saying something when someone objected that Iggy Pop was not, technically, a ‘great voice’ — never argue with a fool in public, etc. But this evening as my scarily erudite beloved scares up images of Moorish manuscripts I did want to second the Public Radio Overlords’ nomination of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
I will be honest with you: I do not know very much about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s music. There is a good reason for this: about thirteen years ago (!) one of the guys I work with hooked me up with the album “The Last Prophet” from Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records label, and this is the only album I’ve ever really listened to by him. In fact, I have not yet gotten to the second track of the album. For the last thirteen years I have been listening to the same track of the same album, over and over, and I still feel that I have not reached the bottom of it.
It’s not counterpoint or a Bach fugue and it doesn’t feature a full orchestra so I suppose at some level the music is not all that ‘complex’, but the tracks is seventeen minutes long and, let’s face it, it combines the best parts of the late Coltrane with Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria, which is not something everyone can say. We get the theme immediately, and variations are pyrotechnic, they climax, and then the piece winds down. There is a lot to say about Khan’s incredible vocal technique — as there is about the guy in the ensemble with the slightly higher voice — but it’s the mixture of intelligence and ecstasy in equal intensity (something that rarely happens) that I find so amazing. And that is just the individual singers. The ensemble work is equally insanely powerful. It’s ecstasy without simplicity, complexity without intellectualism: a genuine, overwhelming craftsmanship of the soul.
Now, In opposition to the ubiquitous refrain today that people are ’spiritual but not religious’ I often insist that I am ‘religious but not spiritual’, and I firmly resist the idea that the Christian music I sing is acultural (if it was you wouldn’t have to be a liturgy junky to get it). Still, I have to admit that this music has a power to it that is undeniable. Is it the piety of the performers or something deeper? I’m not sure — like I said, the only thing I’ve heard is the first track — but there is no doubt in my mind that if these were ‘boy meet girl’ or ‘baby I want you’ lyrics the piece would never have the obvious power it has for both performers and listeners.
I’ve taken a quick look around — most online music stores will sell you the whole album for ten bucks but not the first track. If you have 10 bucks and 15 years of your life free, I’d really urge you to pick the album up. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
“In the little affairs of university life I am alarmed by those who jet themselves through issues and arguments with a burning moral conviction. The result is nearly always bad: if there is someone else burning with an opposed flame, then nothing gets done; alternatively decisions are taken in the white heat of moral virtue, and no-one has thought out how the work is to be done or what will be the consequences. It is better to follow out the cumbersome, tedious, and sometimes devious rituals of compromise.” — F.G. Bailey, Strategems and Spoils
The “modern sensibility” of this Robin Hood is actually one of the least interesting things about it. Admittedly, thin-hipped Jonas Armstrong looks pretty good in his narrow-legged emo-boy leather trousers, and I’d even go so far as saying that he works the forest green hoodie successfully. But that is about it — the piping on the shoulders of Guy of Gisbourne’s bizarre pleather get-up is closer to the Thriller video than our ‘modern sensibilities’, much less the thirteenth century. Maid Marion’s impromptu tai-chi sessions and poorly-done girl-fu (all cartwheels and high kicks) is almost as bizarre as the small number of incredibly anachronistic black people who crop up inexplicably and without comment throughout the film. I would rather have had race-blind casting and said to hell with historical realism than the bizarre tokenism the show exhibits. Which is not to say that Robin Hood is lilly-white — the now-mandatory Saracen member of Robin’s band is quite good, although I think it is a little unfair for the BBC to use her presence to send the multicultural message that “we are all English now” as opposed to the more accurate “we have been invading their homes and slaughtering them without cause for a thousand years, literally”.
There are lots of good things about the show. The supporting cast is strong: Guy of Gisbourne scowls darkly, and he is just the start of it. Keith Allen’s vaugely-swish Sherrif (“would you chose a woman over all this… this… POWER?!?”) is a great baddie. It is Lucy Shelton Griffiths, however, who steals the show. Refreshingly Rubenesque, agentive, and non-blond, Shelton’s Griffith’s Marion is a marvelously strong — and, frankly, extremely beautiful — woman. In fact the best pasts of the show are the scene work between her and Jonas Armstrong, which shows off how complex and torn their relationship is: he trying to win her heart by protecting her, even as she searches for a lover who realizes that she does not need protecting, but seeks to protect others. In fact, the show has a lot of scenes like this which are far better than they have any right to be. The plot centers around the destruction of happy families by oppressive forces, and a surprising amount of their plight is genuinely touching, walking a fine line between melodrama on the one hand and emotionally empty move-the-plot-alongism on the other. This, along with the fact that the first season has an actual arc, raises Robin Hood above your average Hollywood fare.
Which is good, because these days LA sets high standards for action which Robin Hood does not meet. This is one of the weaknesses of the show: despite their attempts, the British simply lack the sensibility — so exemplified in Xena, for instance — requires to take a warehouse full of costumes and a bunch of stuntmen-turned-actors and produce genuine Cheap Action. The fight scenes are only so-so, and not enough is done with the conceit of Robin as the master archer. Even the opening theme-song was preformed with full brass fanfare played by trained musicians and not turned out by a guy with a synthesizer living in Santa Monica who uses his bedroom for his office, which is the way cheap actions shows should have their fanfares made.
Ultimately, however, the greatest weakness of the show is Robin Hood himself. Is he a rollicking adventurer whose effortless competence means he has never lost and never learned to grieve? Is his pure good-heartedness untouched by a sense of moral complexity? Or is he, as the show suggests, a deeply religious patriot, a nobleman accustomed to leading and being obeyed whose benevolent paternalism is challenged by Marion’s feminist demands for parity? Is he driven by vanity, or by a desperate need for affirmation fulfilled only by the adulation of the crowd? Is he the scarred war vet whose experiences of combat have given him hidden emotional depth or a man of integrity who emerged from the Crusades unscarred only by clinging to his values? Armstrong’s Robin Hood promises to be a complex mix of all of these things, but ultimately comes across as incoherent rather than nuanced: haunted one minute, happy the next, but never realizing that tantalizing goal of becoming a truly compelling and multifaceted character. Its hard to tell whether it is the writers’ fault or Armstrong’s or both, but it is a failure that turns a potentially great show into a merely good one.
“The social Super-Robot, mighty Leviathan in his behaviorist’s paradise, is a stirring vision, not devoid of a certain icy grandeur. But the Mind remembers, as in a dream, its pristine thrills; and it turns it gaze away from the Robot… The creative urge stirs once more. Intuition leaps. The phantoms claim their own”
- Alexander Goldenweiser, Robots or Gods, A.A. Knopf 1931, p. 138
Gratuitous and derivative. In an age of endless, lucrative, and repetitive franchise-based blockbusters, it takes a lot of work to be called ‘derivative’. And in a post-300 world, the bar for gratuitous sex and violence has been set so low that it would take a scanning electron microscope to find the area beneath it that is now labeled ‘too much violence and sex in film’. Its not that I didn’t like Spartacus — I mean it was passable, and things could improve as Lucy Lawless and John Hannah get more airtime — but ultimately it was so obviously gratuitous and derivative that the constant realization of how gratuitous and derivative it was got in the way of actually watching the thing.
Before Spartacus began a little message popped up on the screen reassuring us that what we are about to see seems so shocking only because “that’s how things really were back then”. This was an excuse that I bought in HBO’s “Rome”, which did a wonderful job portraying the period it took place in, even if at times you did wonder whether some scenes absolutely had to be set in the middle of an orgy, and whether the Mad Men-esque ethnograhic detailing would appeal to anyone other than Classicists and randy teenagers. I didn’t care for 300 too much, but I admit that it’s well done, and I get why people like it — and of course they threw realism out the door immediately: if they hadn’t they would have had to call it “300 and their 9000 slaves”.
The idea that Sparticus’s violence is somehow not ‘over the top’ but ‘period’ is ridiculous — unless you think that iron-age Thrace is the kind of place where time suddenly slowed down and people threw buckets of blood in slow motion across people watching pitched battles. Equally, most of the sex was Spartacus-as-dildo: close up shots of his hot wife Liking It ending with an incredibly uninteresting All American heterosexual simultaneous orgasm, missionary position and all. There are certain moments in the show when I wonder “what is the director thinking?” except I already know the answer, which is “I know, let’s end this scene with… cunnilingus!”
Ultimately this is the real problem with Spartacus: its not the amounts of sex and violence, it’s how poorly its done. The balletic ultraviolence of 300 has been replaced with gory, by-the-numbers action scenes. Rome’s scene of James Purefoy au naturel getting dried off with a strigil — carefully designed to show off James Purefoy, make a point about Roman perceptions of rank and nudity, and, especially, demonstrate the use of a strigil — has been replaced by the usual large amount of totally naked chicks and just a couple of guys not wearing shirts. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for weird, derivative movies — Brotherhood of the Wolf anyone? — but Spartacus isn’t one of them.
Back in the immediate post-9/11 world people spent a lot of time comparing the US to Rome: imperial ambitious, shared trajectories of decadence, hubris, and decline. Spartacus has some interesting touches (the transitions between scenes through morphing backgrounds and zooming in on maps), but when watching it I can’t help feeling like one of the bloodthirsty, sybaritic bystanders in the show itself. How far we have come from Laurence Olivier hitting on Tony Curtis by talking about seafood. If we keep going at this rate, I shudder to think what is going to go down in the Ben Hur remake.
1. Yes, but does it play Warcraft?
2. It’s a bit sad that Jobs can no longer power the reality distortion field around his body — once upon a time the best part of Apple agitprop were the Jobs presentations. Now of the two videos on the Apple website, its the slickly produced iPad promo rather than Job’s unveiling that is the main attraction. Sad.
3. How is the iPad making Amazon “nervous about the Kindle”? Amazon’s business is selling DRM’d digital books, Apple’s business is selling consumer electronics to read them on… and this is an issue how? The kindle is merely the sixty buck inkjet printer for which Amazon will sell you refills.
4. There shoulda been a Newton reference in Jobs’s presentation.
5. I have this vague feeling that I can’t really justify yet that the transition to handheld devices is going to result in the elimination of free content. I’m not sure really why I think this — people are going to get used to paying for content and will not demand it free, new devices will have app stores and no browsers, content providers will ditch their website for app stores… I’m sure there’s a point there.
Not related to the iPad but:
6. The Roku guys refused to let me include “convenient streaming of instructions from my Martian overlords” as a positive benefit in my review of it on their website.
Ok I’m done now.
There is a lot that is remarkable about Gene Wolf’s Book Of The New Sun tetralogy, but surely one of the most arresting bits (for me at least) comes in the conclusion of the first book where the narrator, a torturer by trade, compares his new-found role as author to the job of executioner which is his in real life. For him, the author is like an executioner. The crowd at a public beheading is like a book’s audience — each member wanting a spectacle. The urge to write, on the other hand, is like the judge: satisfied not by the show but simply completion of the act. The people who bribe the executioner to make the beheading quick and painless — or sloppy and excruciating — are the literary forms and genres that stand at the back of the author, informing and shaping the nature of his performance. And the executioner?
It is not enough for him to earn praise from all. It is not enough, even, for him to perform his function in a way he knows to be entrely creditable and in keeping with the teaching of his master and the ancient traditions. In addition to all this, if he is to feel full satisfaction at the moment when Time lifts his own severed head by the hair, he must add to the execution some feature however small that is entirely own and that he will never repeat. Only thus can he feel himself a free artist.
I think the the thing that we’ve all figured out by now is that in virtual worlds people who do not share the same physical space get to interact with one another synchronously. This is true of phones as well. And videoconferencing. They are, in Schutz’s terminology, contemporaries but not consociates — they share the same time, but not the same space. This is in contrast to different generations of people who, for instance, view monumental architecture or spend time in the same coffee house (“Oscar Wilde sat here”). These people share the same space, but not the same time.
I think someone needs to write a science fiction novel about a virtual world or online game which suddenly and mysteriously becomes inhabited not by non-consociates, but by non-contemporaries: suddenly people from Elizabethan England and paleolithic Java are logging on to the game. Historians and anthropologists scramble to conduct interviews in chat rooms. And then… ok I don’t have a plot, just an idea. But it would be an interesting permutation on the whole space/time thing. So get on that, ok?
I think I am finally getting old enough to appreciate Richard Rorty. I spent a leisurely morning reading some of the essays in Consequences of Pragmatism and enjoyed them — particularly this long quote from “Method, Social Science, Social Hope”, which cuts through several tangles of anthropological ethics:
I said that… it was a mistake to think of somebody’s own account of his behavior or culture as epistemically privileged. He might have a good account of what he’s doing or he might not. But it isnot a mistake to think of it as morally privileged. We have a duty to listen to his account, not because he has privileged access to his own motives but because he is a human being like ourselves. Taylor’s claim that we need to look for internal explanations of people or cultures or texts takes civility as a methodological strategy. But civility is not a method, it is simply a virtue.
Yeah page 202 of Consequences of Pragmatism!
I have a piece on Inside Higher Ed on the Kindle for Academics which you can read, if you choose to.
Bureaucracy is the ice-nine of social organization.
Joss probably didn’t intend for the name of the Dollhouse season opener to be some oblique reference to the upcoming kol nidre holiday, but regardless episode one had a strong sense of teshuvah to it as the show returned to where we left the season finale, wrapping up plot points and unleashing new ones for the new year. I watched Dollhouse and Flash Forward back to back on teh Tivo and the difference was striking — one a superbly executed but extremely derivative corporate project (start with sudden crash, include random uncannily placed animal — there was even an Oceanic Airlines billboard!) while Dollhouse is a resolutely original project that struggles to deliver on its promise. Some of the wrapping up on Dollhouse was disappointingly pragmatic: Amy Acker drove off to her other show, while Enver Gjokaj was on screen just long enough to explain why the makeup crew wouldn’t have to be reapplying the Alpha Scars for the rest of the season (as well as to telegraph future DeWitt intrigues). Dichen Lachlan was on for what appeared to be purely contractual reasons.
There were moments of sparkling dialogue — mostly of the DeWitt Vs. Guys In Suits variety — but I for one miss the days when in the course of 90 seconds Joss could simultaneously give David Boreanaz a cameo on the last episode of Buffy, explain why he wasn’t going to be on for longer than that, and tie up stuff with Buffy in a realistic way but non-subplot starting way. The scene where Bamber is convinced Dushka is spy and she explains away her attempting to break into his desk as a sign of her enthusiasm to find out where their honeymoon will be was very nicely written but man did the Topher/Saunders scene not do the work it was supposed to dramatically, although it did give me a very good sense of what the writers were striving for.
Meanwhile, we did get to see Apollo and Wesley again which is welcome and I look forward to seeing how they get incorporated into the show as Joss moves towards sukkot, and I’m hoping we’ll get to see Alan Tudyk before simchah torah. We’ll see — overall I’m guardedly optimistic that Joss will make good on the ‘do-over’ that Fox has handed him.
Probably the most important thing I learned from this trip to Papua New Guinea was how to use my cellphone.
In 2007, my last trip to PNG, I had an American cellphone that didn’t work in PNG and mobiles (as everyone except Americans call them) weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. This time, however, it as a different story. My usual MO in life — learned from one too many computer role playing games, I reckon — is to minimax: learn thoroughly and completely the things that I have to know and do my best to completely ignore everything else. This was true of my cellphone as well: after a bike accident in 2005 I found myself in the emergency room with no way to contact my wife. When I recovered, we both agreed that this was not something that should happen again. I got a cellphone, figured out how to use it to call my wife, and then did my best not to learn anything more about it. When I arrived in PNG in 2009 I found that everyone — as in ‘my sister in the village’ everyone – had cellphones, and that my fieldwork required me to call people constantly. As a result the mobile became central to what I did, so I decided to figure out how it worked.
I knew that my phone had tons of features that I had never used before that I really should have known how to use — at least to avoid the awkward situation of being unable to text back Kerim in the middle of AAAs — but what as really gratifying was to learn all the functions it had as a tool I didn’t know about, or turned out to be much more useful than I thought. Everyone who already knows how cellphones work, please feel free to stop reading now.
At the most general level, phones are tremendous time sinks which can be used to fritter away spare minutes. In the context of my work life, this was a major reason I decided it would be better if I didn’t figure out how to customize my wallpaper. But in the context of corporate fieldwork, which often involves spare minutes sitting in foyers with nothing to do, screwing around with your cellphone is a welcome diversion. If I were doing ‘village’ type fieldwork, these types of spare minutes would be filled with other things — I mean really, when you’re in the field, nothing is a ‘spare minute’. But for office fieldwork, yeah, its nice to have that escape.
More specifically, I think this is the trip where I finally wrapped my head around the idea that a mobile phone is something that you can both stuff in your pocket and shoehorn a ton of applications in. Mine has an alarm clock (good for travelers), my sisters has a flashlight (superb idea for developing countries). Why haven’t they engineered a church key into the back of mine yet? Then it would be truly complete.
Of all of the tools shoehorn onto the cellphone, the camera is the one I get the most use out of. I lived through the Great Blog Explosion of ’03 suffering through the endless procession of auto-documenting bloggers posting images of their lunch and their friends feeling that this was a tie sink I definitely did not want to get into. But in the context of fieldwork an endless procession of images of your lunch and friends is exactly what you want. Having something at hand lowers the barriers to taking pictures dramatically, reduces the need to carry around a separate camera (and batteries), and in may situations can cue a whole series of positives social interactions, which is anthropologese for ‘when you’re board, you can start taking photos of your friends, all your friends start taking photos of you and everyone else, and everyone has a good time’. Then the next time you are board you bluetooth that good stuff back to your computer and have fun with your family looking at the photos and tagging them up and suddenly you find yourself developing a pretty decent photoarchive/census of your village. Yeah cellphone!
Of course I am hopelessly behind the times — even as I write this the cellphone is ceasing to exist, replaced by multiple new devices which represent strange convergences of the iPod, Blackberry, and game console. But I think for now I like the idea of staying on the low end of the market. My rudimentary understanding of the ‘handheld device’ market is that it is becoming more and more an ‘all your eggs in one basket’ sort of approach. For fieldwork — at least in PNG, where theft/lost of shiny consumer electronics is a real concern — I much prefer a ‘big metal in the center’ approach: a big fat basket in a secure location, backed up regularly, into which you put all your eggs; a panoply of several smaller, cheaper devices that are raskol-donatable when push comes to shove (or just one low-range mobile); and a second serviceable low-end computer like an ASUS eee PC or one of those cheapo mini laptops which can be used to take fieldnotes if you are traveling away from your base for a couple of days, or if your main computer has a mishap. I guess another way of saying this is that you need only three devices of decreasing power and complexity: a big fat computer, a smaller backup/travelling computer, and a handheld device.
A second thing I learned in the field this time, connected to these thoughts on taking technology to the field, is this: take many flash drives. Many, many flashdrives. Back up your data on them, put them in a plastic bag, and then bury them in a location only you know. That, my friend, is the way to backup your data. Of course, you will still probably need a big terabyte drive if you are doing videos, photos, and audio. But you know what? BURY THAT ONE TOO. Then make a third copy of your data. Put it in on a flash drive. Make a small slit in the fleshy part of your back, insert the flash drive, and then stitch it back up again to make sure you have copy of your data on you at all times. No just kidding. Just keep the third copy of your data in your pocket when you walk around.
(Thing I learned 2.5: If you have to chose only 1 network, go with BMobile — Digicell has no coverage in Porgera (enormously important to you, I’m sure), and this way you don’t pay outrageous interchange fees to ring landlines.)
Here is a third, and more embarrassing, admission to make about something I learned in Papua New Guinea: if you plan to interview some of the richest and most powerful businessmen in the country, be sure to bring a pair of long trousers. I have no idea why this did not occur to me sooner, but for some reason I thought I could just waltz into these lushly appointed corporate offices in my shorts without my shirt tucked in wearing a baseball cap with the flag of Papua New Guinea emblazoned on it and get taken seriously as a researcher. What was I thinking? I conduct my research in PNG wearing what I usually wear everyday in Hawai’i: a button down shirt (not tucked in), cargo shorts, and L.L. Bean chaco-style sandals. The big difference between PNG and Hawai’i is, frankly, that in Hawai’i I wear long trousers to class and shave on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, whereas in PNG I shave regularly but don’t wear long trousers. I realize now that dressing like this was a mistake — while this look is pretty standard for some segments of the white anglophone expatriates crowd, in a corporate context it just seems bizarre. Much of the first five minutes of my visit to an office involves doing a certain amount of Goffmanian impression management to let people know that I’m to be taken seriously. Usually the balding, multi-syllabic speech about social network analysis — what I have glossed in my fieldnotes as ‘professor face’ — gets the job done pretty quickly. In fact towards the end of my fieldwork I found I had to tone it down to keep from scaring people away. Office wear in PNG is pretty much the same in Hawai’i — except even muted aloha shirts are not really done by expats, although PNGian seem to go for them. In retrospect what I should have done was gone for a look that I think of as ‘associate dean at a fundraiser’: Green UH polo shirt with logo on breast, tucked into khaki slacks, brown belt with blackberry holstered, and like friggin’ Rockports or something.
In the event, the only long trousers I have are a pair of black jeans and some blue Dickies for visiting Porgera, which look a little more ‘mailman’ than they do ‘executive’. This is ok in the context of mining companies, where even corporate headquarters have prominently placed fire extinguishers, men in reflective/protective gear enter and leave regularly, and little clocks record with pride how long it has been since any of the secretaries has suffered from a Lost Time Injury. But in certain prominent law offices whose indirect lighting, art premier-adorned walls, and acres of casually spacious office at the top of pricey office high-rises, showing up looking like you’ve come from the assay lab is just tacky.
Fourth thing I learned in Papua New Guinea: I respect Ben Stiller’s oeuvre. After condescendingly assuming that Stiller-branded broad comedy was beneath me in the past four months I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by how much I like his work. Some of this — Tropic Thunder and I think its called Keeping The Faith (which for idiosyncratic reasons my wife and I both loved) — I saw in the states, but a lot of his other movies are popular in PNG and I’ve liked what I’ve seen here as well. Of course I’ve also become totally fixated on You Don’t Mess With The Zohan as well, so maybe I’m just going soft-headed.
One of the arguments of my work is that Papua New Guineans are creative, innovative people and not the type of folks to try to carry on their traditions unchanged ‘from time immemorial’. Anthropologists reading this will know that I am not the first person or the last person to make this argument, although it often is in tension with certain forms of the Papua New Guinean imagination for which ‘traditional culture’ is often imagined to be ‘intact’. One well-known anthropologist who has made this argument much more persuasively, and much longer ago than me is inimitable Roy Wagner. Shortly before I left PNG I reread his book The Invention of Culture for the first time since I started graduate school and was blown away by its power and insight in a way that I don’t remember being when I was a first-year graduate student.
And so, in honor of Roy I wanted to share some pictures that I took recently. These come from a social club in Port Moresby, specifically from floor-to-ceiling murals each of which is about two meters long. There are three in the set. They are ‘dogs playing poker’ murals, except it is not ‘poker’ but ‘snooker’. And instead of — or rather, I should say, in addition to — wearing bits and pieces of Victorian apparel, some of them are wearing traditional PNG bilas.
One dog with a bilum and another with a pig’s tooth necklace:
Here’s a closeup of the necklace dog:
And the bilum dog:
And here is my favorite: a dog with a bilum cap.
This is a little too rich for me to untangle. There is something going on with race here (white attire/traditional bilas/anthropomorphism) that I don’t understand. Or not. Looks like its hard to make a bridge with your fingers when you have a paw — that guy with the necklace is shooting across his forearm.
Creativity: It Happens.
This story is old news to people who live in Port Moresby, but the other day the Burns Phillips Building burnt down. For most of Port Moresby, this meant that the last of the big old colonial buildings are gone — a sad fate for a country which already has so few historic buildings. But more pressing for regular readers of this blog, many of whom live in places where a building built in 1900 does not count as ‘historic’ — the big loss is the KMC franchise, which went up in smoke along with the Tribal Den night club, the Internet cafe and (apparently) the National Narcotics Bureau. Here is a picture courtesy of the “Madang — Ples Blo Mi” blog:
Adieu, KMC.
(from last week)
Since my initial blog post on Kenmaity Chicken I have conducted addition ethnographic observation of this institution on two separate occasions. First, I ate in at the KMC at Gordons on 5 July in the evening, roughly from 1900-2000. Then today I visited the KMC in town and got more chicken to go.
A large of part of being an anthropologist is learning to see the details of the world in a way that is lost on others. These details typically slide away and beneath us for two reasons: first, because they are so familiar to us and we see them so regularly that we parse them quickly, taking them all in in one big gulp of typification (as we say in the business). In short, we lose the details because they are too easy to see. Second, we lose the details of a world because, when we encounter it, it is strange and new to us, and people who experience new worlds either force them into familiar frameworks of understanding(blotting out the truly novel) or else the novelty is blindingly bright, rendering us unable to appreciate its man subtleties or nuances. For anthropologists — or anyone else who has become thoughtful about what it means to observe — the goal is to strike a balance between being keyed-in enough to understand a situation, but not so keyed-in that the details start slipping away beneath them. In typical ‘culture shock’ fieldwork, anthropologists get to experience both of these extremes, beginning as neophytes and ending, so we like to think, as ‘insiders’.
I always say that human are the most sensitive and complex recording devices on the planet, but also, alas, one of the worst storage devices. We take everything in — smells, sounds, textures. We can listen to the sound of a crowd and then focus on an individual conversation, all without rearranging any microphones or messing about with recording levels. We can feel social dynamics and moods uncapturable on video, even when this takes of smacking ourselves on the head five minutes after the fact and exclaiming “she wanted me to kiss her!” And then we fall asleep, wake up the next morning, and the details is gone, turned into an amalgam of remembrance and impression.
A good example of this are my many errors in describing the KMC shop in town. As Nelson points out, I got the spelling of the name wrong (no surprise to regular readers of the blog): it is in fact Kenmaity (without an ‘e’) as Emmanuel spells it in his blog post. My description of the “the white piece of paper slowly peeling of the wall next to the cash registers which reads ‘a TEAM is MANY hands doing ONE job’ in a vaguely elegant italic font” while right in intent, only vaguely captured what is actually written on the wall (I don’t have the full text yet but hope to get it at the start of my next visit).
Some of my descriptions were more accurate. Consider, for instance, my favorite poster (or perhaps my second favorite given a newly-noticed poster that I will describe below):
One of the the most enigmatic of these posters features the torso of a white toddler (unusual in a country where most people are not white) emerging from the bottom of the frame, a beatific smile on his face — of longing? fulfillment? — wearing a pair of overalls over a collared shirt. His hands are lifted straight up, straining towards a Delicious Chicken Burger which is as large as he is. What makes this particularly unusual is the fact that these images are superimposed over the background of a beach, complete with saves and a seagull flying away. However, the beach scene is upside down — as if the Delicious Chicken Burger has been dropped out of a plane and the baby shortly afterwards, they are both about to be land in the water, and someone has hung the picture upside down.
Here is a picture (from the Gordon’s branch, but the same poster):
The baby is in a t-shirt, without a collar. I didn’t mention the KMC logo in the upper left hand corner of the poster (perhaps I didn’t think it important to mention). And now, as I revisit the scene, I increasingly think (but cannot prove) that the child is pursuing a fishburger rather than a chicken burger. Or so it seems to me now.
Here is another photo, which I described as an “image of a young girl with tremendously round eyes who looks as if she is in a trance state or startled by a loud noise, who sits with her hands down on a table on which lies a bucket (to scale, this time) of fried chicken.”
The big thing that I missed here is that she is holding her hands to her head, rather than down on the ‘desk’. Also, on second thought I would describe the look on her face is ‘overwhelmed’ or ‘over-awed’ by the chicken beneath her. You might also describe it as a look of fixation or longing for the chicken. Also, the airbrushed white lines which are meant to represent the alluring warm scent of the fried chicken are worthy of mention, methinks.
Here is a third picture, of “ a round-faced child… about to bite into an enormous drumstick which is immediately adjacent to some copy describing the benefits of feeding young children fried chicken”
Here my description is accurate, but only because it is so brief. The chinglish text is truly amazing but I didn’t write it down. Also, on reflection, I believe this child is being fed chicken by another, unidentified person.
And finally, here is the money shot:
Having visited the KMC at Gordons (and waited a long time for my chicken) I’ve had a chance to see another KMC, and I think this has given me a chance to see the one in town with new eyes, giving me things to look for. This last time, for instance, I missed a poster which I saw at the Gordons shop. This one, which I think is now my favorite, pictures four white people seated close together around a table, smiling and looking down at a hamburger so enormous that that only its bun, about four feet across, is visible in the frame.
In many ways this discussion of KMC is not a very good representation of ethnographic fieldwork. All of my writings about KMC are based on memory, since I did not take any notes in the restaurants. Also, while anthropologists often write about places where interactions happens, this description focuses on objects and totally excludes people, which are what I actually study. I’ve done this mostly because I don’t want to blog descriptions of my informants (who are entitled to privacy) or, even worse, my friends here in PNG who are not expecting to be put under the microscope at all.
The difference between an anthropologist and a tourist (and I know that sometimes people have trouble telling the difference) is that tourists seek to be amazed by the unusual while anthropologists train themselves to finding the mundane amazing. While it is true that the posters at KMC are titillatingly weird to Americans, I think they help exemplify the way in which anthropologists learn to see things in new ways, and how this vision requires its own sort of discipline — one which cultivates curiosity, rigor, and a belief that the world will never stop being surprising.
Much of my research in PNG this time around includes trying to schedule meetings with highly-placed business men, in some cases some of the most prominent ‘captains of industry’ in the country. Getting ‘access’ — i.e. getting them to talk to me — has not been impossible but it has taken a fair amount of time. Much of my mornings are spent phoning offices and assign if there has been any move in scheduling an appointment with Mssrs. X, Y, and Z.
Sometimes people have genuine reasons not to see me — some executives travel regularly for their work and are rarely in town. Some are in the middle of particularly busy periods during my time here. Contacting these very busy people is complicated by the fact that none of them, as far as I can tell, keep an appointment book, agenda, or schedule: it is very rare for me to be able to say “well if this week is bad, how about four weeks from now on Tuesday at 2”. For whatever reason, they simply do not plan like that, as far as I can tell.
At other times, however, I have encountered something that feels like the run around. Sometimes I think this might be because of negligence on the part of the secretarial staff: I call for an appointment, they promise to call me back, they never do, I call them back, they say they are waiting on me to drop off a hard-copy of my informed consent sheet so they can pass it on for review before the executive sees me, I drop it off, I don’t hear back, I call them up and ask if the executive has received the form, then they say that I shouldn’t have dropped off the form and the proper procedure would have been to call first. Then I tell them I did call first and was told that I’d have to drop off the form, to which they respond that I had best start over by calling tomorrow and asking for an appointment. This cycle repeats, and this time they tell me I should email first. Then I email, don’t hear back, call, am told my call will be returned, wait, call back, and then they ask why I haven’t dropped a paper copy of my informed consent sheet off. In some cases I eventually hit on the right combination of secretaries and media and manage to get an interview scheduled. There are still a few offices, however, where I have saturated them with every conceivable form of information about my project and still have had no luck.
There are legitimate reasons for this, I suppose. This endless round of broken promises to “call you back” and repeated requests for the same information you have already sent people twice does act inadvertently (“never blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence”) as a filter to screen out random people who are looking to waste executives’ time. However in my case I have a legitimate reason to speak to these people, particularly as most businesses in PNG — and especially the mining and petroleum sector — are hyper-committed to transparency in order to stave off accusations that they are secretive greedy capitalists. So while business might be well served by keeping some people away from executives, I do not believe they are well served keeping me away from them. I certainly have never been refused an interview when I have gotten through to the person in question and, frankly, I think people enjoy talking with me — it is not often that you get a chance to talk about things that interest you with someone who understands in relatively good detail what you are on about.
Of course, even if it is true that I am the sort of person who should be able to get a meeting with the country manager of a major corporation, this fact might not be apparent to the front office: I mean, how often do you have anthropologists calling up and scheduling appointments? So I think my status confuses people as well. The first step of my research was to visit all of these offices and ask for annual reports and other publicly available documentation so that when I did interview representatives from these companies I wouldn’t have to ask moronic questions like: “so, do you currently have a mine operating in PNG?” There are a few offices of mining companies that I have walked into – typically the ones who have ‘environmental issues’ — and begun describing who I am only to see the smile on the face of the secretary tighten into a rictus, as if they were preparing to not lose their composure when I chain myself to the desk and start carving the words ‘no more riverine tailings disposal’ into my chest wish a pen-knife. When I say that I am only there for a copy of the annual report their relief is palpable.
After a month of attempting to get important people on the phone, it seems to me that this is the best strategy: call as specific a number as you can — if you have the direct line to their personal secretary, call that rather than the main desk. When someone picks up the phone, ask confidently for the person in question by their first name. Make sure you know what their first name is, and how to pronounce it. If they have a nickname that you know they use in the course of daily business, use it. Don’t lie to people about who you are or your relationship with the person you are trying to contact, but don’t request refusal in the guise of asking permission either. If for some reason they do put you on the line directly with the person in question, introduce yourself and schedule an appointment and thank them for the call.
If your call is routed past the first few secretaries and is intercepted by one further up the line — which is the most likely thing that will happen — and they ask who is calling, then introduce yourself in the most formal terms possible. I regularly describe myself as “Dr. Alex Golub, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa”. If you are doing dissertation fieldwork on a Fulbright, introduce yourself as “Ms. Jane Smith, a Fulbright Scholar from the University of X.” Don’t embellish or brag: “at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, a world center for the study of the Asia-Pacific”. This is just gross. But do present yourself in the most formal light and don’t be self-effacing. You have official titles for a reason and you shouldn’t be afraid to use them judiciously.
Just, you know, don’t make up extra titles for yourself. I haven’t gotten very far in the offices where I’ve introduced myself as Professorsaurus Rex.
Chicken and chips have been a staple form of fast food in PNG ever since I have been coming here. I still remember fondly the kai bar across the street from the Rainbow Mart in Mt. Hagen where they added garlic to the oil they fried the chips (‘french fries’) in. After 8 hours in a PMV from Porgera and a month or two on a steady diet of rice and Maggie noodles the mixture of protein and grease — eaten in the privacy of a hotel room no less — provided a pretty primal form of solace, not to mention two days worth of calories. Since the late 90s the king of high-end chicken and chips in PNG has been Big Rooster, whose cartoony mascot and red, white, and blue signage once reigned supreme over Boroko and Town. But no longer. Since my last visit to the country a contender has stepped into the ring: KMC.
That’s KMC, not KNC. It stands for ‘Kenmaiety Chicken’. There are at least two branches of the chain, which my friends agree is a ‘chinese business’ (some versions of the logo do have Chinese characters in them) but which I think might be a chain from Singapore or Taiwan. The menus in plastic display stands which are scattered around the tables include images of bento meals which have been covered with small white stickers on which the words ‘not available’ have been handwritten in pen. I know these details because I recently visited the Moresby branch, which is across the street from Pacific Place (the premier high-rise building in Papua New Guinea) and in the same run down building as the Tribal Den Hotel, which is the kind of place where girls who look like they should be in high-school sit out side smoking insouciantly and appear to be waiting for — what is the polite way to say it? — a piece of the action. Just off the main drag of Champion Parade Ground, then, KMC is in the down-scale block of Port Moresby.
The restaurant is part of a two-story complex of store fronts which includes a wang ba I don’t frequent and some second hand shops. On the inside it is an extremely large, open space with plastic fast food tables — sort with brightly colored molded plastic seats bolted into a metal stand fastened to the floor, like the MacDonalds I used to frequent as a kid. The counter is wide and behind the attendants are the heated glass storage cases filled with various forms of fried chicken. Behind these you get a glimpse of the kitchen, where men and women in disposable paper hair nets prepare meals. The people who take your order wear visors with the KMC logo. Its more corporate branding than most restaurants or businesses in PNG have, and the seriousness with which KMC takes its business can be seen in the white piece of paper slowly peeling of the wall next to the cash registers which reads “a TEAM is MANY hands doing ONE job” in a vaguely elegant italic font.
The menu of KMC chicken is, as you might expect, tilted towards fried chicken. I think they may do burgers. In addition to different amounts and sizes of chicken and chips, they also have the ‘chop’ (a boneless chicken schnitzel with orange breading and a slight hint of cayenne pepper, which rates a chili-pepper super imposed on the image of it on the large picture menu hanging over the front counter), and a ‘mexican chicken wrap’ (tortilla with tomato, lettuce, chicken nuggets), and various ‘combos’ which combine chicken, chips, and a drink.
The color-scheme of KMC is yellow and bright green, with red highlights Like big rooster, it has adopted as its motto an image of the live version of the animal that you consume in the store — although the happy, anthropomorphic chicken in a chef’s toque which serves as KMC’s mascot is rather more closely observed than Big Rooster’s smiling, tremendous-chested paragon.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about KMC is the series of large posters which hang on the walls depicting people eating food. One poster near the cash registers is unusual in that it depicts a pretty young Asian woman attempting simultaneously to smile and lick an enormous soft-serve ice cream cone. More frequently, however, the photos are of children who are just moments away from eating food. One of the the most enigmatic of these posters features the torso of a white toddler (unusual in a country where most people are not white) emerging from the bottom of the frame, a beatific smile on his face — of longing? fulfillment? — wearing a pair of overalls over a collared shirt. His hands are lifted straight up, straining towards a Delicious Chicken Burger which is as large as he is. What makes this particularly unusual is the fact that these images are superimposed over the background of a beach, complete with saves and a seagull flying away. However, the beach scene is upside down — as if the Delicious Chicken Burger has been dropped out of a plane and the baby shortly afterwards, they are both about to be land in the water, and someone has hung the picture upside down.
Other pictures include: a round-faced child about to bite into an enormous drumstick which is immediately adjacent to some copy describing the benefits of feeding young children fried chicken, and another image of a young girl with tremendously round eyes who looks as if she is in some sort of trance state or has just been startled by a loud noise, who sits with her hands down on a table on which lies a bucket (to scale, this time) of fried chicken.
Perhaps my deepest regret about KMC is that my research now keeps me so sedentary that I can’t in good conscience eat the amount of chicken necessary to sample fully from the menus of both KMC and Big Rooster to decide who truly has the best chips in town. I will work on deciphering the Chinese characters in the logo, though.
One of my main goals of this round of field work is to consciously improve my skills as a fieldworker — to do very uptight, professional, even ‘scientific’ fieldwork. There are several reasons for this.
First, I am teaching the methods course for my graduate students when I return from PNG in the fall so I figured I’d better have something to teach them. Of course, I’ve done fieldwork before, but I felt that I wanted to take the high road, as it were, and give them a very formal version of fieldwork, and then try to let them know about other, more casual options out there. The other option, which is to tell people that field work is ‘just hanging out’ but that somewhere there are books with ‘scientific’ methods that are morally and epistemologically dubious, is not really very responsible — its much easier to learn how to hang out when you’re in the field than it is to come up with your own system of coding fieldnotes. How to ratchet ‘down’ rather than ‘up’ as it were.
Moreover, I actually brought the books I’ll be using in the methods class to the field with me, and I’m reading them as I do my fieldwork. Hopefully this will allow me to teach them better, since just reading about what sort of fieldwork strategies they suggest is quite different from reading them while you are waiting outside someone’s office for an interview. And waiting is something I am doing a lot of — my fieldwork this time around involves formal interviews with busy, important people who are concerned about how they will be represented in the press and the wider world. Unlike my earlier fieldwork, which was in part classical ‘living in the village’ type of stuff, my current research is much more typical of what I imagine a certain type of urban sociology is like. People want to see a professional, courteous researcher and are willing to talk to people who think adhere to professional standards. So… I am trying to adhere to them! Of course, I’ve always done my best to be a careful, prudent scholar. But now I have an entire apparatus to signal to people who have only just met that this is what I’ve always done.
Second, when I moved to a four-field anthropology department, I really took on board the critique of loosy-goosy cultural anthropology that came from the Other Fielders. I was already sympathetic — the rigorous, humanistic anthropology I was trained in was, in general, skeptical of the excessive epistemological cynicism that marks a lot of cultural anthropology today. So the question became: Instead of talking with your friends in your fieldsite about what an interesting and unanswerable question some topic was, and rather than write essays in which you wondered what the answer to it might be, what if you actually tried to find out what the answer was. I’ve designed my research this time around to be very focused around an empirical problem, while still leaving room for all of the general ‘hanging-out’ which is an important part of fieldwork.
I think this willingness to embrace a ‘scientific’ rather than a ‘humanistic’ notion of rigor has been a major turning point for me in my post-doctoral career. At the same time, it is a qualified turning point. Nothing is more boring than the moral and personal agendas of people who feel ‘science’ provides some sort of deep truth/is a replacement for religion or the meaning of life (Mars In Our Time!) and naively worship fantasies of assembly-line 100% accurate bench science which are light years away from the experience-actual experience of lab work as described over and over again in memoirs ethnographies of science. But I figured, as long as you approach it in a decentered way (as Habermas might say), it would be fun to see what this sort of mind-set yields?
So I think my first realization was the power and utility that comes from being willing to wean oneself away from epistemological commitments that one gets thoroughly stuck to in graduate school. Its called ‘growth’.
Shortly after arriving back in Papua New Guinea though — my fourth trip to the country in the past 11 years — I found myself immersed in all of the precise, demanding, microscopic interaction that comes with fieldwork: learning to see through the lens of long experience in a country, but also having to learn how to give up what you know in order to see the things that will make you learn; learning to be who people want you to be interview situations, without being untrue to yourself or to them — finding that version of yourself that fits best with them; learning to be a guest with people who you are living with and with whom pretense really does not solve the big problems of how you will share space and time; managing the delicate balance of reciprocity that is so much a part of life in PNG, ‘even’ in urban Moresby, a balancing act I’ve spent so much of my life learning how to do, and even more learning how to think through; and most importantly, telling the next chapter of my life together with the friends and family I’ve come to have in this country, trying to make sense of our relationships now that my two-years stay moves more and more into the past and our biographies change in ways that none of us could have imagined when we first met.
One of the things that my insanely broad-scoped reading around for my methods course has taught me is that I’m much more sympathetic to the how-to literature in ethnographic sociology than in anthropology, and as I designed the syllabus I kept asking myself ‘what is anthropological about this? If ethnography is a method used by many disciplines, what is distinct about anthropology’s take on it? Except perhaps that that is the part I like least?’ Having come to the field expecting to be taught the powers of a ‘scientific’ conception of research, what I discovered was the incredible human potential that inheres in the occasion of ethnographic fieldwork: like raiding in World of Warcraft, ‘the field’ is a space charged with emotional importance, deeply attached to your sense of self and self-worth. And above all, it is a space full of other people. As one wise member of my guild once said about raiding “the possibilities for progress or regression are immense” — I feel that, in fieldwork, you are faced with such an enormity of relationships, simultaneously over-analyzed and also only intuitively half-grasped, that the only way to do good work and maintain your mental health is to become a good person. Of course, there are shortcuts and temptations: the license that comes from being a first world white in a third world black country, the ease of deceit and dissimulation. This time coming through Port Moresby I feel as if life is applying tremendous pressure to every joint in my body, forcing every dislocated sentiment and inclination back into its proper place and warning me that the nay options involve pathological tearing of the ligaments of my soul. (I also think that the best way to be a great anthropologist is to be a good Jew, but I’ll save that rumination for Sof).
Of course, this is true of many kinds of fieldwork, including ethnographic sociology. But I think maybe this sort of potential for self-transformation is particularly present in anthropological fieldwork, where ‘immersion’ is so prized. Of course, anthropological fieldwork is classically also the least ‘answerable’ since it is the most get-away-with-it-in-the-field-y discipline of all social sciences. But despite the fact that not all of anthropology’s previous practitioners were as great as they could be, the fact still remains that the intensity of social contact in anthropology, and the willingness to blur boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life’ may make it unique in the opportunity it affords one to straighten out one’s internal and external object relations. This was my second realization doing fieldwork this trip — or at least in the first two weeks! — that I came for the ‘science’ but stayed for the ‘humanity’.
A lot of my research this time around in Moresby begins with the phonebook: making lists of a dozen or so institutions to call for interviews, call them up, and then see if they’d be interested in talking with me. This means that a lot of what I’ve been doing the past couple of weeks is cold-calling people, which is an unpleasant task both for me and for the person on the other end. Just as surely as I get tired of repeating the same introductory paragraph about who I am and what I want, so too I am sure that the secretaries who have to deal with me have better things to do than to figure out which office to transfer the anthropologist to.
One of the most unexpected aggravations of cold-calling people, however, has been dealing with the phonebook itself. As most readers of my blog know, Papua New Guinea is usually pronounced PNG (pee ‘en jee). And many of the businesses and institutions that I deal with have names that start with some version of PNG: The PNG Chamber of Commerce, the PNG Chamber of Mines and Petroleum, etc. etc. Often times important institutions simply are not listed in the phonebook, and in this case I have to start asking my personal contacts for information about them. But in other times, they are listed, but they are listed under ‘Papua New Guinea’ instead of ‘PNG’ (which is alphabetized between ‘PM’ and ‘PO’ in the phonebook). And best of the the ‘P’ section of the phonebook begins with a section dedicated to companies whose names start with ‘P.N.G.’ since P. is alphabetized before Pa, for some reason. As a result I have to look every institution up in multiple locations to make sure that I haven’t missed it. Sometimes groups are listed twice, or there are ‘see also’ entries. I am sure that there is some reason why there are three separate entries for PNG in the phonebook but this drive me nuts. Of course, since I am probably the only person in the country doing something as crazy as calling everyone with an institutional name that begins with ‘PNG’ I suppose I am also the only one put out.
The datasphere in PNG is thin and irritable. If I had no Internet access whatsoever, then I could deal: when living in Porgera I wrote letters, actual paper letters — physical correspondence which so many of us have already given up. Of course letters are easy to loose and, let’s face it, completely illegible when I write them. Even my patented Obviously Avoidable Blog Misspellings don’t mar the coherence of my prose as seriously as my own hand. But letter writing, I know.
Always on or always off, that I can handle. But the intermittent, expensive, half-available nature of Internet communication in PNG is a different sort of beast. If I lived here I suppose things would be different, but at the moment I am trying to juggle between a mix of expensive wireless access which requires me to lug my laptop around everywhere and purchase Hotel Espresso in exchange for a seat in the wi-fi zone, and the apparently-on-dialup wang ba wedged into the far end of one corner of Chinese-run shops in the Steamships in town. Suckage. If any readers can recommend a good Internet café (preferably in town) or have an office with a big computer and an enormous information pipe that is like, you know, going totally unused, then feel free to drop me a line.
My new strategy is to write these blog entries at home, after my normal anthropological daily diary, and then try to find a time to post them. When that time will be I’m not sure — I may end up posting them after I arrive back in the states. Or maybe I’ll time my Hotel Espresso runs for moments when I can post batches of entries at a single time. We’ll see. For now — over and out.
The National is running a piece called “Let Cops Stay Longer”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/050809/nation4.php, which quotes Pakiru Pundi as urging the government to extend the state of emergency in Porgera and that the house burnings reported last week were not serious. His concern appears to be that illegal miners and non-ethnic Porgerans are colonizing the valley.
Some of the National’s reporting seems a bit off — Pakiru is described as “paramount chief” of the Tieni (there are no ‘paramount chiefs’ in Porgera) and Yarik, his home area, is listed as an ‘illegal settlement’. But there is absolutely no doubt of the fundamental legitimacy of Pakiru Pundi as a Porgera landowner and his deep involvement with Porgera over decades adn decades of time. The overall the drift of the article is clear — the story of mine, government and army arrayed against and oppressing ‘indigenous’ Porgerans hides a more complex, and probably more accurate account of a variety of forces, including multiple landowner groups, trying to deal with the growth of population in the valley as a result of, among other things, Engan colonization.
I’ve always wondered what terrible, secret price Joss Whedon had to pay to Alan Tudyk in order to get him to acquiesce to being killed off on a movie _explicitly designed to keep a franchise going_. And now I know.
I imagine that Dollhouse is going to be canceled after the season finale, since it has gotten so good. It is a pity — Joss is really warming up to using the chair. We’ve seen dead people, children meeting different versions of themselves, attic’d employees put back in the bodies of dolls, and now we know Tudyk has been on a steady diet of egg whites, toast, and exercise in order to fit snugly into his probably-organic-cotton doll jammies.
Maybe it’s Joss’s fault for making shows that don’t get really going until people have already given up on them, or maybe people who like to watch good TV just do it over the Internet now. Even if they do cancel Dollhouse, at least the Tudyk-reveal last night gave me a ‘wtfbbqsauce’ moment the likes of which I haven’t had in _years_. Literally.
Good lord: “Barrick-recommended military force burns down hundreds of homes in PNG”:http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/04/30/18592070.php
And this from the Post Courier: “Porgera locals to sue government”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20090501/news01.htm
Update 1 May 09 17:30:
Here’s a roundup of some more links. Some of these pages are being edited while live so sometimes the content changes.
Radio New Zealand: “PNG Denies Paper Report About Porgera Fires”:http://www.rnzi.com/pages/news.php?op=read&id=46298
ABC: “PNG Villagers Allege Police Destroyed Homes”:http://www.radioaustralianews.net.au/stories/200904/2557368.htm?desktop
Dominion: “Indigenous Community Leaders Confront Barrick Gold In Toronto”:http://www.dominionpaper.ca/weblogs/%5Buser%5D/2632 (note how Ipili are now ‘indigenous’)
You can also listen to about 8 minutes into this broadcast of today’s As It Happens to hear an interview with Jethro Tulin: “As It Happens 1 May 2009″:http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/asithappens/20090501-aih-3.wmv — I have a (hand-typed) transcript if anyone wants it.
From the post: “Porgera up in flames”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20090430/news01.htm
I haven’t seen anything from Barrick yet, and have no news ‘from the ground’. I’ll try to comment more tomorrow.
p.s. in other news, “Joe Gabut has been assaulted by people from the Tari-Hides area”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20090430/news02.htm.
From “The National”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/042409/nation4.php
For some reason, the wikipedia page on “Chinese people in Papua New Guinea”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_people_in_Papua_New_Guinea is unusually good.
“A good interview with Joss Whedon”:http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2152 (on monetizing web content)
“Tanach On Demand”:http://www.lashon.net/CL/Tanach/Tanach.cgi PDF generator
“Old Weird America”:http://oldweirdamerica.wordpress.com/ — a blog which combs through old Folkways recordings and mixes them up with other transformations of the songs/ideas/artists who are featured.
Someone should write a diet book called “The Passover Diet”. It could maybe have a blurb on the back from Madonna or have a picture from Kabbalah on the front or something. The secret of the passover diet is not ‘no leaven’. Instead, it would be the process of training people to look at food and have their first thought be “I can’t eat that right now” instead of “I should eat that”. I mention this because I am going through this process myself today. It changes your world to realize that you are surrounded by piles and piles of food being sold by a dozen vendors and you really cannot eat any of it. I think if Americans’ first thought was “I can’t eat that right now” instead of “Mmmmm, brownies!” a lot about the country would change.
The hydrocarbon industry in Papua New Guinea is moving so quickly at the moment that I usually don’t bother posting all the interesting articles I read. However, “this new article in Euromoney.com”:http://www.euromoney.com/Article/2173612/CurrentIssue/71519/Papua-New-Guineas-pipeline-to-change.html?ID=71519&p=1 is pretty in-depth and helpful for discussing what is going on macroeconomically in the country.
“Thanks much!”:http://www.whygodwhy.com/2009/the-compleat-lounge/
You know, if you made a movie which combined The Stand and Deliverance, it really wouldn’t be anything like Stand and Deliver.
I think I like this idea mostly because the name is so rad, but TechCrunch blogged recently that the music industry has run the numbers and is tentatively planning the USD when they give up on keeping people from sharing music. Apparently “Ultimate Surrender Date is between 2011 and 2013″:http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/big-music-will-surrender-but-not-until-at-least-2011/.
“Erik Spangler”:http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/cgi-bin/user_page.pl?url=espangler (composer/DJ)
“Clay Spinuzzi”:http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/spinuzzi/ (professor and author of a “book I want to read”:http://www.amazon.com/Network-Theorizing-Knowledge-Work-Telecommunications/dp/0521895049/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207878172&sr=8-7 but don’t have US$80 to shell out to buy it)
“Elizabeth Rata”:http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/education/about/schools/crstie/staff/educationstudystaff/elizabethrata.cfm (Maori academic)
“Thorim”:http://www.wowwiki.com/Thorim_(tactics) (Titan boss)
The New Yorker has a “nice talk by Jane McGonigal”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/mcgonigal if you want to hear more about her work on Alternate Reality Games.
I’ve been following the deployment of the Papua New Guinea Defense Force to Porgera for a while but here is some info for the record:
First, ABC’s main piece with an interview with Ila Temu:
“PNG Troops Deployed to Curb Highlands Lawlessness”:http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/pacbeat/stories/200903/s2505288.htm
As well as a shorter piece in the national from, I believe, 13 March 2009
“PNGDF Called Out To Curb Crime In Porgera”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/030209/nation31.php (scroll down)
They have an editorial as well: “Impose State of Emergency on Porgera”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/030209/lead_editorial.php from the same day.
*Roman Holiday:* It should have been Cary Grant
*Bringing Up Baby:* It should have been Audrey Hepburn
*Breakfast At Tiffany’s:* It should have been Mr. T
*Solicitous Vampire Paramours:* Angel is number one. Everyone else is number two or lower.
The price we have to pay for a new Joss Whedon show is, apparently, the gross hypersexualization of Eliza Dushku. I’m willing to live with this — Dollhouse is more than just another big-hearted, snarkily-written show where all the characters talk like Joss. The central technical conceit of the show — that you can wipe and replace people’s personalities — is also a wide open door to explore themes of world-bracketing and _mise en abyme_.
On the one hand, the show burrows down through multiple layers of reality anchored below the dollhouse — the various fantasy worlds the show uses to undress and imperil Dushku in each episode. This is a fantasy situation for the writers — the story arc of the Dollhouse reality can be interrupted in any episode by a one-off episode that can literally be about anything: its a situation drama without a situation. Or rather one which is a metasituation which can accommodate any number of stories inside itself.
Its also interesting to think about the character development that occurs between the Dollhouse reality and stata beneath it. The dolls and their support staff develop relationships in and through interactions in the lower reality. The friendship between Sierra and Echo thus develop half consciously (or not) (or consciously to a degree that the audience is not yet privy to) while they are other people.
On the other hand, you can’t give Joss a chair that erases your personality and not expect to see the technology ramify upwards. Honestly: Do you think Olivia Williams knows who she actually is? As the show looks for dramatic wallop it will surely give it to us by building narratives above the Dollhouse reality in which staff supposedly secure in their identities are revealed to be programmed pawns of bigger actors with darkly shrouded identities.
So despite the gross sexualization of Dushku the show has potential — there is always the possibility of the gross sexualization of Tahmoh Penikett and Dichen Lachman to look forward to, for instance. But seriously, despite my mixed feelings for the first couple of episodes, its clear that the world of Dollhouse is a big playground, and I look forward to seeing how Joss plays with it.
“Compulsive gamers not addicts, says head of Europe’s only clinic to treat gaming addicts”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7746471.stm
The mountain of evidence and consensus in this topic is getting so huge it might actually start to penetrate public opinion.
The latest issue of JRAI taught me that “Yael Navaro-Yashin’s”:http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/staff/furtherinformation/navaroyashinfurtherinfo.html “work”:http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/staff/publications/navaro-Yashin.html looks really fascinating.
“Save The Words”:http://www.savethewords.org/
“Cornify”:http://cornify.com/
“Geophysical survey of world of warcraft”:http://technollama.blogspot.com/2009/01/geophysical-survey-of-world-of-warcraft.html
I refuse to force this ridiculous meme onto others but because people I respect have asked:
1. I am a Jewish intellectual from Northern California
2. There were three times in my life when I genuinely thought I was going to die. In retrospect, the first time I was just being overly dramatic — a point the second and third times drove home rather forcefully.
3. As a result I value human life now in a way I didn’t before.
4. I think Arvo Part’s style works well for instruments but not voices, so stop asking.
5. I think lists like this are a rather cheap form of narcissism given the amount of navel-gazing the Internet enables.
6. Deep in my head at night before I fall asleep I am writing two novels set in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Ekumen” universe.
7. I prefer to eat small, intensely flavored objects.
8. My wife says I am “compulsively irreverent”
9. I am 90% sure that I know who I was in my previous life, and a little disturbed that I could believe in such a silly thing.
10. I believe in the positive power of conflict and am skeptical of people who want to ‘resolve conflicts’ instead of seeking ‘empowerment through crisis’.
11. I don’t care if I am on the top of the ‘healing done’ meters as long as I am at the bottom of the ‘percentage overhealed’ meter.
12. I am against cruelty to animals but I am not going to stop eating foie gras and I cannot reconcile these two commitments intellectually.
13. I totally believe that we must not give in to the “bigotry of low expectations” even if the phrase was popularized by a President I didn’t vote for advocating for a kind of education reform I oppose.
14. I can sight-read a Palestrina motet, and I’m proud of it.
15. I used to be obsessed with obsession, but I think I’m getting better now.
16. I believe in human duties, not human rights.
17. I think it is about time that we dusted off second wave feminism and gave it another go.
18. Latkes, not hamentaschen.
20. To the extent that I still have a favorite movie, Miller’s Crossing is it.
21. I think the best text that can be used to understand how borders organize difference is the “Mexico” episode of Tony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”
22. I believe that Real Artists Ship.
23. I have never listened to Led Zeppelin II or Help so that I will not ever run out of things to listen to by The Beatles and Zep.
24. I was going to write a long blog entry pondering what it says about America that in the original Star Trek Kennedy-Era liberalism’s fantasy of the Racial Other was an Ashkenazi Jew playing a Vulcan but in Obama Era new version of Star Trek it is a Mexican until I learned that Zachary Quinto was Italian.
25. I think Willow Rosenberg is a fine role model for Jewish people everywhere.
I have been listening to this piece (and the string quartet from which it’s been extracted) for a month now. You should pay a buck and listen to it too if, and only if, you want to listen to really really ravishingly beautiful music: Musica Celestis for String Orchestra is available on “iTunes”:http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=135478800&id=135478574&s=143441 and “eMusic”:http://www.emusic.com/downloads/emp/song/10915884/14013152.emp?gb=lm.
The string quartet is on “this album”:http://www.emusic.com/album/Aaron-Jay-Kernis-Kernis-Symphony-In-Waves-MP3-Download/10953497.html.
Just put it on in the car or your office. You won’t be sorry.
I have a new column on “The Flaws of Facebook”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/03/golub up at Inside Higher Ed, which is mostly about the reason that I don’t like to use Facebook.
“Premature Deathcoil problems”:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4665388392&sid=1&pageNo=1 almost as good as “I think my tank is grouping with someone else, and we have three DPS so I can’t just leave him”.
“Lihir has stopped production for the time being for landowner issues”:http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssPreciousMetalsMinerals/idUSSYD39339920090126. Ouch.
“He cannot hide from me.”:http://salul.wordpress.com/
For everyone who was wondering about the ancient and enduring ties between Mexico and Vanuatu, look no further.
“Did you ever see Star Wars? It was very accurate.”
- Jazz musician Sun Ra speaking to music critic Francis Davis
Via the excellent “American Ethnography”:http://www.americanethnography.com/article_sql.php?id=71 — a sort of cross between Gapers Block and American Ethnologist.
Holy overlap, batman: Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose book I’m teaching this semester, has a very nice documentary on BBC about Obama which features both his Hawai’i connection (including his mother’s time in my current department) and his time at the University of Chicago (including snippets of an interview with a former member of my MA committee). Even in the midst of the endless Obama news glut I think this thoughtful and informative show is worth listening to:
“Obama: Professor President”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001×0v6
Somehow with Taiwanese politicians having their careers ruined over PNG diplomacy scandals and egregious witchcraft killings in the highlands and developments with PNG’s big hydrocarbon projects you’d think I’d have something else to say but in fact the one newspaper article I have to blog about or else I’ll forget it is in fact that “Barrick has a new CEO”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601082&sid=a3iif9TXhW8c&refer=canada. Go figure.
I’ve been remiss in promoting myself.
I was recently “featured at WoW Insider”:http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/01/06/15-minutes-of-fame-anthropologist-digs-into-wow/ which has sparked some “other”:http://news.gotgame.com/anthropologist-studies-wow-nerd-rage-and-guild-friendships/23203/ “coverage”:http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/88496-Anthropologist-Studying-Culture-of-WoW-Raiders — some of which even “makes me blush”:http://e4ae.blogspot.com/2009/01/alex-golub-my-new-hero.html. I think I expected a lot of things to happen to me in my life, but a blog post entitled “Alex Golub is my new hero” was certainly not one of them!
I gave a paper about my research on World of Warcraft at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco in November. It was entitled “Raiding, Its Projects, and Its Publics or, Where Is The World of Warcraft “:http://alex.golub.name/res/Golub%20Raiding%20Projects%20Publics%20AAA%202008.pdf and you can read it just by clicking on it.
Meanwhile the paper about WoW I submitted to a journal six months ago is still mia…. sigh.
Ta-nehisi has an “article in Time on Warcraft”:http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1577502-1,00.html. It’s good and captures the ambivalence that a lot of people — especially adults — feel about WoW. Good on him.
Years ago a friend of mine introduced me to “Action!”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206467/, a short-lived TV series starring Joy Mohr. He had taped episodes off of the TV and then hoarded the precious, precious cassettes. I watched it, loved it, and then _totally_ forgot about it, only to discover recently that they have now (of course) re-released the show on DVD and that you can watch it on Netflix Streaming or IMDB.
Watching it a second time I like it even more than the first. In 12 twenty minute episodes the show explores the life of movie producer Peter Dragon (played against type by pretty boy Jay Mohr, who turns in a marvelous performance bristling with apoplectic rage) and his dysfunctional entourage as they try to make an action blockbuster.
The show is unique in many ways — guest cameos by A-list celebrities, it mocks its own executive producers, and so forth. But really makes it stand out is its overwhelming, over-the-top obscenity. ‘Edgy’ is not a good description and ‘raw’ does not do it justice. Antisemitic, homophobic, sexist, racist, and politically incorrect Action both makes me squirm in my seat and laugh uncontrollably. The last couple of episodes (written after they had gotten the axe, I reckon) aren’t as good, and I doubt if the show could have sustained its manic intensity for more than a season, but the hour or two of good TV that they’ve left us is truly worth watching.
I have been thinking about what makes people want to play — and particularly group and even more particularly raid — with other people in World of Warcraft and perhaps this is obvious, but the three things it comes down to are gear, skill, and fun.
The first and most obvious thing is that you must be *geared*. If you do not have the gear, you just do not get in the door. You must get geared, and you must take responsibility for your gear. And by gear I do not mean just weapons and armor — I mean having pots, food, reagents, getting your gear gemmed and enchanted. You just have to come prepared.
But gear only gets you in the door. No matter how geared a player is, they need to be *skilled* as well. I am constantly amazed by the difference in performance between an undergeared, skilled player and an overgeared unskilled player. A common mantra of my guild is that we need to recruit good players, not geared players, because you can always get players geared up, but you can’t make them more skilled. This is not actually true, I think — as a teacher I am all about helping people become more skilled! But in general it is much easier to get people geared than it is to do all the hard work necessary to get them to improve their play style, or even get them to the point where they are willing to put in the time to learn.
I guess actually the difference between gear and skill is one of degree. A computer and a decent connection are part of the gear you need as a player, and if you are lagged constantly your performance will never be that great — and it won’t be your fault. Equally, a lot of getting geared is about skill and attention — knowing the gems you need, the enchants you use, and getting them on your gear. So gear enables skill, even as skill helps optimize gear. Maybe I should call ’skill’ ‘care’ or ‘concentration’ or ‘focus’.
Finally, there is *fun*. You have to be fun to play with. Not just not an asshole, but actually a likeable person. I know a lot of people who make excuses for not including people in their groups or raids because ‘they are under-skilled’. What they really mean is ‘I can’t stand the guy’. We like to pretend that our reasons are not this subjective, but let’s face it — playing are included, and learn from others, and get better gear when they are well liked. Even more, having an atmosphere of trust and friendship actually makes you play BETTER. It provides that critical focus and hunger that makes raid successful.
So there you have it: gear, skill and trust. I think you could analyze a lot of characters and guilds in terms of these three ideas.
There is a “good article on who played what last year”:http://www.massively.com/2008/12/29/gamerdna-and-massively-look-back-at-the-mmo-year-in-review/ on GamerDNA — useful. Note to self.
What is up with the “om nom nom” meme? I have been hearing it for the past two months at least. As a piece of slang it is meant to signal positive evaluation of an object through the onomatopoeiaic sounds of devouring it. For instance:
“[cuffs of ridiculous spell power] omnomnomnom”
I think there is a bit of infantilization here as well — I think people may believe themselves to be mimicking the Cookie Monster. Here consumption is understood as approval-through-cookie-monster-role-occupance.
The Globe and Mail is running a longish article on “Papua New Guinea and China’s New Empire”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081231.wyorkchina0103/CommentStory/International/home. The piece begins with a description of China’s ‘new empire’ and its use of soft power, especially in Africa, and ends with a discussion of the Ramu nickel mine. It is an interesting piece, although not as interesting as the “comments”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081231.wyorkchina0103/CommentStory/International/home attached to it (e.g. “Let them drink the water from the fast running amoebic streams and let them suffer from the toxic snails that are everywhere.”)
The piece strikes me as balanced and it represents most sides of the story — on the never-ending issue of entrance visas, for instance, it notes that Chinese are frustrated with the lack of skilled workers in country (a chronic problem in PNG’s booming mining and energy sector these days) and the PNG bureaucracy’s lack of capacity (“low proficiency” is how one Ramu exec described them to me). At the same time, it also notes that Chinese do enter the country illegally.
In many ways the Ramu story is not particularly new — a foreign investor starts a mine, creates a community affairs department, struggles with landowner discontent, gives equity to stakeholders, etc. What is interesting — and not touched on heavily in the article — is the fact that Chinese people have been in Papua New Guinea for over a century at least, and that long-standing anti-Chinese sentiment, rather than independence-era anti-Australian sentiment , is being mobilized. Crucially, this means both PNG and Australian sentiment will be focused against the Chinese.
I would have liked to see more regarding the debate over tailings disposal, and there is no real discussion of landowner politics, except that there are some and they have some — there is no story, for instance, of the unraveling of the agreements of the late nineties and early oughts which had been secured before Highland Pacific started its long search for a partner with the capital to build the mine.
But as a general overview of Chinese softpower in the Pacific, it is a good way to start.
“Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”:http://drhorrible.com/ is, let’s face it, touch and go. If you love Joss Wheedon then its hard to ignore it, despite its unevenness and lurking doubts about Neil Patrick Harris’s ability to channel Joss’s dialogue. But if you sit through the first minute or so of the opening monologue you are rewarded with the Freeze Ray Song, which is definitely worth it.
The conceit of Dr. Horrible is pretty straightforward: post-college emo white boys are aspiring supervillains seeking to be included in the Evil League of Evil — sort of a cross between getting made by a mafia family and getting signed to a major label. In the meantime they are crushed out on girls who also secretly think their cute and would go out with them if only they had the nerve to say something to them when they saw them in the laundromat. Its bad guy as good guy, let’s turn this genre upside down and shake it and see what falls out, but in a ‘digital media microformat’ ‘Once More With Feeling’ kinda way.
This mix of romance/superhero show is epitomized in the Freeze Ray song, which combines tropes of supervillain ultraweapons with love song imagery of freezing the perfect moment of intimacy with your beloved so you can experience it forever (I’ll bend the world to our will/and we’ll make time stand still). Its clever and sweet and even a little catchy despite the occasional lyrical misstep (You make me feel/what’s the phrase/like a fool/kinda sick/special needs) and, let’s face it, a melody written for a singer whose range is only a major fourth.
Its not that supervillains have never been examined before, but Joss’s work with them really is interesting. In some way it follows logically from his previous work: Buffy was about a powerful woman with a tremendous destiny who wished she could live an ordinary life. Angel was about powerful people living an ordinary life wishing that they could have a tremendous destiny. In Dr. Horrible supervillains share the same aspirations that superheroes have in other movies: to save the world. But Joss’s insight is that superheroes never actually make the world a better place, they only keep it the same — they work to protect the status quo. Dr. Horrible, in contrast, wants to change the world, to remake it and remove the glaring injustices he sees around him — by putting himself in charge. On this account, supervillains are not bad people, they simply represent the authoritarian urge — the urge to remake with one’s own hand — to fix what is obviously wrong.
On the other hand Captain Hammer, the Dr. Horrible’s nemesis, is a bit of a flop. I get that in Joss’s reverso-world superheroes are smug sadistic assholes, the star quarterback to Dr. Horrible’s science fair nerd. But Nathan Fillion simply doesn’t suit the part, and to be really effective as a character Captain Hammer would have to be sickeningly violent — too brutal for the tone of the show. I think it would have been more effective to play him stupid instead of cruel, as someone who only saw things in black and white and was thus at first more attractive for the love interest than Dr. Horrible, who could then be seen as more nuanced and human.
At any rate, worth watching. And its Joss singing the Bad Horse letters!
Somehow I’ve become embroiled in Taiwan-as-Austronesia. Here is someone who has written about this:
“Christian Alan Anderson”:http://omnivoyage.org/about_chris.htm
Includes publications. Note to self, note to self, note to self.
I recently finished teaching Intro to Anthro, and for one of the last sessions I taught Kiri Miller’s conference paper on “Guitar Hero’s Rock Pedagogy”:http://guitarheroresearch.blogspot.com/2008/05/guitar-heros-rock-pedagogy-iaspm-us.html which is a great piece on an even more fascinating topic — Guitar Hero. As I was preparing for class I thought about how restricted our conversation about Guitar Hero would be because so few students had a sense of what real technical virtuosity in music making is like. After some googling I just said “screw it, half way through the class I’ll just show a youtube video of Hilary Hahn playing the final movement of the Sibelius violin concerto.” This went well — one student said that her fingers looked “CGId” because, you know, we all know that humans can’t really do that and it must have been a special effect. But, more to the point, I began googling Hilary Hahn some more.
I choose to show the Hahn performance for the rather poor reason that it was top hit in most of the search engines I tried for various combinations of ‘Sibelius concerto violin’. I had some vague sense that she was some physically striking prodigy who put out albums of Standard Romantic Showpieces With Covers Depicting Physically Striking Young Women Clutching Violins To Their Barely Concealed Chests which has become sort of a thing as major classical labels desperately try to get people to keep listening to their albums.
As it turns out, in fact, Hahn is a fascinating and articulate person who has been keeping an online journal since the late 90s and has “blog entries going back to 2002″:http://www.hilaryhahn.com/journal.shtml. She posts regularly, has “short pieces”:http://www.hilaryhahn.com/ittybitty.shtml, “a youtube channel”:http://www.youtube.com/hilaryhahnvideos, “twitter alerts”:http://twitter.co/violincase, and all manner of other things.
Frankly, I’m not a big fan of twitter and don’t watch that much youtube — but thanks for the channel Hilary, 60 people who never heard that Sibelius now have had a taste — but I have to really give it up for the blog entry and another recent, longer “thoughtful piece on crossing musical genres”:http://www.artsjournal.com/npac/2008/05/new-avenues-in-collaboration.html. Its great to see an artist be so thoughtful in public about what they do. I was really impressed.
_(I gave this drash at my shul, Sof Ma’arav, yesterday. Exactly as predicted, Littman did point out the inaccuracies in tracing the patrilineal connections between Laban and Jacob so if you see an error, feel free to comment but remember…. most shortcomings have already been reported!)_
This is my first drash at Sof, and I’m very happy and excited that I have this opportunity, but I have to admit that I was also nervous as I sat down to figure out what I was going to say. I mean, _Sof Ma’arav_: as the horizon line has rolled slowly across the planet, Jews all over the world have gotten up, gone to shul, and then taken all the good ideas for drashes. And now here I am, all the way at the other end of Greenwich mean time, trying to come up with something to say without totally hogging all the remaining ideas left for the guy in Fiji who’s on deck to go in a few hours from now. What’s a nice Jewish boy to do?
I’m kidding course, but it is true that its hard to find something to say about this parshah. Its not that there’s nothing to talk about, its just that it seems like everything has been said. In this portion we have Jacob’s Ladder/Stairway/Ramp, an image that has echoed across the generations to inspire not only the spooky 1990 Terry Gilliamesque thriller starring Tim Robbins and Elizabeth Pena, but also Led Zeppelin’s immortal rock anthem. As a commentar on this text, how could my drash compete with Jimmy Page’s face melting solos? We have the origins of the twelve tribes of Israel, which is obviously really important and I thought at first I might talk about that but its actually really confusing and seems to have been like edited to the point where it no longer makes sense and I didn’t want to say something and have Littman come up to me at the oneg and say “you know if you read the crypto-Byzantine translation of the Septuagint…” and all that so then, ok, there I decided not to talk about that. And of course we have Laban — the person who generation of Bar Mitzvahs have taken as the example of how not to be Jewish despite the fact that, when you come right down to it, he and Jacob are both equally proficient practitioners of the art of the con.
No, instead what I want to give today is what I call the ‘B’ drash. I call it the B drash because its about one of the moments that aren’t talked about so often — the flip side of the LP that we’re reading today. What really caught my attention was the story of Rachel’s theft of the idols, the terafim, from Laban. Why does Rachel steal the terafim? And why doesn’t she tell Jacob that she has them?
Some commenters have said that Rachel has stolen Laban’s idols because she wanted what was best for him — namely, to stop worshiping false gods. Now, this is a very nice thing to say about Rachel but it is a little like saying Jacob stole Laban’s flock because he was afraid there was too much protein in his diet and wanted to encourage him to eat more leafy greens.
What if we treated Rachel as the equal of Jacob? What if we assumed that she acted in the same way that he did — taking valuable and important things that she wanted to keep from a household she was leaving. Why, if we assumed this, did she steal the terafim?
One possible answer comes from Nancy Jay’s book “Throughout Your Generations Forever”. Jay’s book is a close analysis of the similarities between the religions of ancient Israel and pre-contact Hawaii. For reasons that I can’t go into here Jay’s analysis of Hawai’ian religion is maybe off a little for the way that it relies on the work of Valerio Valeri which is you know maybe not quite right or whatever, but I do think her analysis of ancient Israel is interesting. Jay points out that biblical scholars have spent centuries trying to figure out the complicated family relationship between Laban and Jacob. Why did Laban take Jacob in? Did he adopt him? Why does Laban call Jacob ‘his own flesh and blood’ when Jacob is actually only his in-law and not related to him by blood. Its all really complicated and requires extremely muddled and unelegant solutions.
But, says Nancy Jay, what if the patriarchs were not really patriarchal? What if it wasn’t just us who trace Jewish descent through the mother’s side, but the patriarchs did as well, and then edited it out of the torah in order to make the men feel better? Well, anthropologists like myself know how such ‘matrilineal’ societies work. ‘Matrilineal’ doesn’t mean, alas, that women are in charge. It means that men are in charge but women carry on the family name. So for instance in a patrilineal system me and Kate’s kids would be Golubs, and they’d have to listen to what I say and watch me carve the turkey at thanksgiving and all this, and Kate’s brother’s kids would grow up to inherit the Lingley name and I’d get to be their crazy uncle who lives in Hawai’i and spoils them with too many chocolate covered macademia nuts on their birthday.
In a matrilineal system, on the other hand, me and Kate’s kids would be Lingleys, they’d be watching Kate’s brother carve the turkey, and I would spoil them silly. Meanwhile, I be worried about maintaining the Golub family home, which was going to be inherited by my sister’s children.
This is exactly what we find in this parshah. Jacob is Rebbeca’s son, and Rebecca is Laban’s sister. _That’s_ why Laban treats him like his own flesh and blood and not his inlaw. And its also why Laban is so nervous about Jacob. Laban’s sister lit out of town with this Isaac guy leaving him to take care of the family estate and with no clear inheritor. Now Jacob shows up, a cousin who is eligible (in this system of marriage) to take control of the estate, and Laban starts wondering how long its going to be before he wants to sit in the Big Chair.
These idols, these terafim, are ‘family gods’ — the deities worshipped by members of Laban’s family. Owning them is a way of showing control of a family, or being in charge of it.
So often when we read this parshah we tell ourselves the ‘A’ story — the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob story, the story of patriarchs and their sons. Its the story of page 115a in our prayerbooks, the amidah without matriarchas. But what if we read this parshah in spirit, as it were, of page 115b? What if the story of Rachel and the terafim was not about a woman fleeing her homeland to become part of a foreign house? What if it was a story of woman deciding, literally, to take her life and her inheritance into her own hands?
We Jews like to tell ourselves stories of continuity, inheritance, tradition, and antiquity. We tell ourselves stories of exile and diaspora and survival, too of course — but most of the time thesestories are about what were done to us, not choices we made. One of the reasons I got really into Rachel in thinking about the parshah this week is that it made me imagine the matriarchs as really proactive: people who chose a new life while simultaneously preserving their ties to the pass. This is an image of a Judaism that is modern, innovative, nurturant, and cunning. These are not the typical adjectives we pile together to describe who we are, but I’d here in Hawai’i, with Shabbat just beginning for us and almost over for everyone else, on an island whose native people have so much to teach us about both commitment to the land and the empowerment that comes from long-distance voyaging, perhaps now is the time that we should all try, at least a little, to be as daring as Rachel.
For teaching:
“Nations and Identities: Classic Readings”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/063122209X/ref=s9sips_c6_14_at3-rfc_p-3237_p_si3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=1KC0P6YR9VF189W7XM3T&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=463383351&pf_rd_i=507846
“Becoming National: A Reader”:http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-National-Reader-Geoff-Eley/dp/0195096614/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226457781&sr=1-1
Woah — my IHE piece on raiding got picked up at “WoW Insider”:http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/11/04/inside-higher-ed-compares-raiding-and-teaching/.
I’ve given up my plan of developing an expertise in WoW in China — although its something that I’m keeping my mind on. Luckily, the project is in better hands than mine. There is a nice “piece on Bonnie Nardi’s work”:http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2008/10/wow-in-china-and-us.html as well as a “shorter earlier piece”:http://sciencedude.freedomblogging.com/2008/09/11/uci-tackles-world-of-warcraft-mystery/. Bonnie is great and I’m looking forward to reading the research results!
“Air Conditioning and the Material Culture of Routine Human Encasement”:http://mcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/251?etoc
There are many factors shaping the relationship between human bodies and their immediate environments and the mechanical control of ambient thermal conditions is playing an increasingly important part. It is with this in mind that this article travels to the tropical island of Singapore where the assumption that the air surrounding people should generally be cooled has quietly become entrenched. Specifically we focus on the young people we find in this country and consider how the presence of air conditioning has become implicated in particular combinations of social practice and sensual expectation amongst this group. The conclusion we draw is that it is only by attending to the contextual interplay of bodies, clothing and immediate climate that we gain the fullest sense of the processes underwriting a much wider retreat into indoor social spaces where these elements could be usefully understood as the material culture of routine human encasement.
I’m always interested to see what sort of images and models people use to understand rural Papua New Guinea — tribes, clans, peasants, etc. So I was thought this recent article about “warring hill tribes in the Southern Highlands”:http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/programguide/stories/200810/s2384715.htm was pretty interesting. “Hill tribes”? That’s not one I hear very often. I think of Tari as being a relatively flat place. ‘Hill tribe’ sounds vaguely Southeast Asian to me (as in “of Burma”). Perhaps it is a model imported from the Philippines by the Filipino nun who is being interviewed?
I have a new op-ed piece at Inside Higher Ed entitled “fear and humiliation as legitimate teaching methods”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/28/golub if you’d like to take a gander.
“The Pimp MMOG”:http://the-pimps.de/
By Germans, even.
PNG is not as susceptible to analyses of neoliberalism that way that other places are, but the living edge of privatization and all its ambivalences is the phone system and Digicel. There’s a nice new article on “Digicel and BMobile”:http://www.islandsbusiness.com/islands_business/index_dynamic/containerNameToReplace=MiddleMiddle/focusModuleID=18199/overideSkinName=issueArticle-full.tpl in Island Business that is worth reading to keep up on current trends.
“Graeme Kirkpatrick”:http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/graeme.kirkpatrick/publications writes on games and computer use. Unfortunately the link to his piece at “Max Weber Studies”:http://www.maxweberstudies.org/issue-2-2.htm? 404s.
Kiri has “another article on GTA”:http://digiplay.info/node/3214
Digiplay in fact has a “listing of articles on WoW”:http://digiplay.info/search/node/warcraft most of which I know about, but not all of them.
Every couple of months I relink to “Henry Lowood’s page:”http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood/vita.htm and his “cool courses”:http://www.stanford.edu/class/filmstud203a/html/schedule.htm so I don’t forget about them.
Tanya Krzywinska has been busy with “another anthology about games”:http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/catalogue/book.asp?id=1100.
Ok that is it for now.
And now some notes on Cultcha:
Two books on the wider concept too expand beyond my typical scope: “Culture 1922: The Emergence of a Concept”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7371.html and “Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6731.html
And two new albums:
“Corigliano’s settings of Bob Dylan lyrics”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001DELX6W?tag=wwwnaxoscom-20 is finally out, w/Hila PLitmann singing.
Also “Steve Reich’s Daniel Variations”:http://www.amazon.com/Daniel-Variations/dp/B0016O6ZA8/ref=dmusic_cd_album — I actually like the piece for vibes quite a bit.
This is in general a sign of my warming to minimalism… or at least _listening_ to it…
Ap is “reporting on a new Pew study”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080916/ap_on_hi_te/tec_video_gamers_2 that shows that over 95% of all teenagers play video games. The “Pew study itself can be found here”:http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/263/report_display.asp
For the next time I have to advise students re China/Taiwan/Ethnicity: “Melissa Brown”:https://www.stanford.edu/dept/anthropology/cgi-bin/web/?q=node/106.
On both the American culture and intellectual history tip: “Michèle Lamont”:http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/lamont/
I’m making a little list:
“Virtual (Br)others and (Re)sisters: Authentic Black Fraternity and Sorority Identity on the Internet.”:http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/5/528?etoc Matthew W. Hughey. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 37, No. 5, 528-560 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0891241607309987
“Matt Sharritt”:http://www.situatedgaming.com studies video games.
“Bernard Levinson”:http://www.amazon.com/Deuteronomy-Hermeneutics-Innovation-Bernard-Levinson/dp/0195152883/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220217346&sr=1-2 studies the hermeneutics of legal innovation in Deutoronomy.
Two Quicken replacements for Mac are “iBank”:http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/ and “MoneyDance”:http://moneydance.com/. “Sente”:http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/introduction.html manages your library.
“Geoff Eley has a reader on Nationalism”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195096614/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link from the mid-90s that is… well… very mid-90s.
I am not the only one thinking about “the ethical issues of social impact assessment”:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a902020273~db=all?jumptype=alert&alerttype=new_issue_alert,email
Mike Manning, chair of Transparency International and a major player in the “Institute for National Affairs”:http://www.inapng.com/ “died Saturday in Rabaul”:http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/200808/s2344888.htm?tab=pacific. Mike was a naturalized citizen of Papua New Guinea and he epitomized a certain sort of crusty, cynical Australian expatism that is such a strong — and ambivalent — part of PNG’s history.I did not know Mike well, running into him occasionally, most recently at an embassy party in Port Moresby in the summer of 2007. He was pro-business and anti-mucking about, but underneath the gruff demeanor had a kind streak and a genuine desire to help others.
Mike spent much of life trying to help business flourish in Papua New Guinea, and for me the most important thing about this was his support for original research and policy work at the INA. INA publications remain an important part of understanding Papua New Guinea and indispensable ‘grey literature’ about the country and they form, like the INA itself, a part of Mike that will continue to live on in future years.
“Michael Kimmel”:http://www.concertideas.com/mk/michaelswork.htm has a “new book”:http://www.amazon.com/Guyland-Perilous-World-Where-Become/dp/0060831340/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219339310&sr=8-1 that is relevant for my work on WoW. Meanwhile a “report of female social science Ph.D.s”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/21/socsci also recently came out. And of course Papua New Guineans have “gender defying goats”:http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n8/htdocs/meeting-kevin-rudd-130.php
(The “RIA has an outreach program”:http://anthropologistabouttown.blogspot.com/)
As Alexandre would say:
I don’t really study the RMT angle of WoW but here are two interesting sites: “WoW Econ”:http://www.wowecon.com/ and “MOO Bux”:http://www.mmobux.com/. I also don’t really study the game design angle or the fantasy RPG angle but two recent volumes stand out, both from AK Peters: “Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568813473/1n9867a-20 and Matt Barton’s “Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role Playing Games”:http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Desktops-History-Computer-Role-playing/dp/1568814119/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product (this last a fuller version of his virtuostic series of blog entries on the genre). These last courtesy of “Brainy Gamer”:http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/04/the-rpg-syllabu.html.
On the science fiction tip: “Agamben and UFOs”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/07/the_truth_is_out_there.html as well as “the relation between science fiction and colonialism”:http://www.amazon.com/Colonialism-Emergence-Science-Fiction-Classics/dp/0819568740/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218911017&sr=8-1. More tangentially related to the second: “A cultural history of causality”:http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-History-Causality-Science-Systems/dp/0691115230/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218910967&sr=8-4 and, more vaguely, “Agamben in Mesopotamia”:http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/BAHR_RIT.html for the first.
Finally: “Liah Greenfeld on nationalism”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liah_Greenfeld and talk about the super hot videos: “Voegelin, Gadamer, Lonergan and _Allan Bloom_ gone wild”:http://www.fritzwagner.com/ev/eric_voegelin.html with a cast of thousands.
“Ryan Pini”:http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/BIO/Athlete/5/8000395.shtml is “in the 100m butterfly finals!”:http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/200808/s2336656.htm?tab=sport Go go go! Looks like “Masalai blog is cheering him on as well”:http://masalai.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/ryan-pini-one-mans-dream-and-a-countrys-hopes/.
“Dika Tou”:http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/BIO/Athlete/1/8000921.shtml placed eighth in her event as wel.
??????????
It occurred to me the other day that I might as well google “Life of the Mind” to see what the Internet thought that it was about. The result, after some clicking around, was learning a bit about “James Schall”:https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/schallj/, a Jesuit and professor at Georgetown. Schall does political philosophy (of the old school) and has also spent a lot of time thinking and writing about liberal education (of the old school). His site includes open access copies of long essays like “A Student’s Guide To Liberal Learning”:https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/schallj/WS17BJVS.htm. Having come out of a liberal arts background I think it is always interesting to watch someone else think about it out loud, especially — forgive the indelicacy — someone so old: his bibliography includes works that look very interesting to me but are just outside the horizon of my own experience.
That said, Schall definitely writes like he was ordained before Vatican II — there are just not a lot of people around today who insist that _all_ young people absolutely _must_ read _Phaedrus_. But so what if he is To The Right? One must be open to all sorts of things. As a person to encounter intellectually and whose work might be useful to teach to students in certain circumstances.
“Culture and Human Rights: Anthropological Perspectives”:concepts of discovery, registration, etc.; pace layering; browsing in the library; thinking about your intellectual regime and life of mind (for the THE chapter)
“Minor Arts of Daily Life”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0824828003 (Kerim-approved)
“Early Human Kinship”:http://www.amazon.com/Early-Human-Kinship-Wendy-James/dp/1405179015/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215245687&sr=8-1
“Russell Jacoby”:http://www.history.ucla.edu/people/faculty?lid=827 (file under ‘interesting profs’)
“On Justification: Economies of Worth”:http://www.amazon.com/Justification-Economies-Princeton-Cultural-Sociology/dp/0691125163/ref=cm_lmf_tit_12_rsrssi0 (a trend I’ve been meaning to encounter for some time and… haven’t yet)
“An Engine, Not a Camera”:http://www.amazon.com/Engine-Not-Camera-Financial-Technology/dp/0262134608/ref=cm_lmf_tit_13_rsrssi0
and
“The Sociology of Financial Markets”:http://www.amazon.com/Sociology-Financial-Markets-Karin-Cetina/dp/0199296928/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216651345&sr=8-1
You know, it is not like the scholarly literature on Max Weber is small. And although most social scientists have worked through some of his stuff at some time or another not all of them are as interested in his work as I am. But even with that said, when Amazon.com sends you an email telling you they have a new book about Weber that they think you might enjoy my general impulse is to run far, far away. This time, however, they got me pegged. “Weber, Passion, and Profits: The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism in Context”:http://www.amazon.com/Weber-Passion-Profits-Protestant-Capitalism/dp/052189509X/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product looks really fascinating, and “Barbalet’s research and publications”:http://www.jackbarbalet.com/index.php?page=current-research look even more interesting. I can’t wait to read some of the stuff on the Chinese diaspora. And talk about small worlds — he’s even taught at the UPNG. Looks like I have some reading to do!
“McFarland Publishing”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/ has a really fascinating list, including volumes like “The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Autor”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-2822-9 and “two”:http://www.gamingcultures.com/ “volumes”:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?isbn=0-7864-2832-5 by “J. Patrick Williams”:http://www.jpatrickwilliams.net/. I will have to try to get ahold of some of this stuff…
Some pieces to be reused in teaching, etc.
In the “I always thought this would make a good study oh hey somebody’s already done it”: “More diversity in view books than the colleges they represent”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/02/viewbooks (quipped one student: its all hot chicks and minorities)
Also, a new study on “relationship violence among undergrads”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/08/violence. Good to think about the next time I teach violence.
It’s been a long time coming, but it looks like “Kuk is now a UNESCO world heritage site”:http://news.trendaz.com/index.shtml?show=news&newsid=1241417&lang=EN. If you don’t know about Kuk you can “read more about it here”:http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5059/
“Ben Kafka’s”:http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Ben_Kafka article on “paperwork, state power, and the French revolution”:http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/rep.2007.98.1.1 is really oodles of fun.
The first number of “The Journal of Virtual Worlds”:http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/issue/view/38 is out and it looks like they did a great job of it. Although some of the pieces included are old favorites — “Lessons from Lucasfilm’s Habitat” for instance — the new stuff looks worthwhile as well. There are always lots of approaches to the study of virtual worlds, and I can’t say that I care for all of them, but the journal (so far) seems to have stuff that appeals even to finicky cats like me.
On the selfhood in America angle, “Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln”:http://www.amazon.com/Making-American-Self-Jonathan-Cultural/dp/0674165551/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215245284&sr=8-1
And on the ‘early modern europe/history of knowledge about the colonies’ theme: “Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe”:http://books.google.com/books?id=BiXjSTNLWIEC&pg=PA335&vq=recapturing+anthropology&lr=&source=gbs_search_s&sig=ACfU3U1bKYUd2unE23NXNQQFlfgVGr3eVQ#PPP1,M1
Some random links and news relating to PNG: “Motu Koita people want compensation for colonialization”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23968054-16953,00.html: one unexpectedly interesting thing about this article is its avoidance of the terms ‘tribe’ or ‘indigenous’ — ‘tribe’ is mentioned once but stays out of the headline, and the Motu Koita spokesman uses the term ‘landowner’ once. Instead ‘people’ is the word used to described these… people. It works just fine.
For more on the colonization of PNG you can read “Chris Ballard and Bill Gammage talk about Taim Blo Masta”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2005/1402194.htm, specifically the Fox and Hagen-Sepik patrols.
In more recent news “China is PNG’s third largest trading partner”:http://www.pacificmagazine.net/news/2008/07/02/china-now-pngs-third-largest-trading-partner , and “InterOil is having hard times”:http://www.forbes.com/markets/2008/07/04/interoil-papua-newguinea-markets-equity-cx_ra_0703markets32.html because, among other things, the Prime Minister thinks the government’s contract with InterOil should be renegotiated. Somare himself is under scrutiny as “the opposition compare him to Mugabe”:http://www.rnzi.com/pages/news.php?op=read&id=40732.
There’s lots more of course, but that’s what was open in my browser window this morning.
Here’s one from ASAO: a nice list of “digitized Pacific resources”:http://www.nla.gov.au/oz/digitised-pacific-resources.html including our own “UH Manoa materials”:http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/research/digicoll.html.
Go librarians go!
“Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics”:http://www.amazon.com/Melancholic-Freedom-Agency-Spirit-Politics/dp/0195319826/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214896943&sr=8-2 by “David Kyuman Kim”:http://www.conncoll.edu/academics/web_profiles/kim.html looks like a great book. That said, I do feel the blurb from Cornell West (his dissertation supervisor) is a bit excessive:
David Kyuman Kim is the leading philosopher of religion and culture of his generation. The breadth of his synthetic imagination, the scope of his scholarly knowledge and the depth of his poetic wisdom is amazing. How rare it is to see such delicate style, nuanced analysis and robust vision in one figure and text in our compartmentalized academy and terrorized society. His dark hope summons us!
I must admit that no one on my dissertation committee thought that I offered hope of any sort, much less the dark sort that summons people.
More seriously, though: although I do not know Kim, his name and the fact that he has a Th.D. from a div school… am I being stereotypically reductive in suggesting that we have found someone to be the Korean Christian version of Patchen Markell? Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to guess at Kim’s faith, but this combination of subject position, obvious intelligence, and philosophical projects sounds really enticing to me. So… I will have to check it out.
This is me trying to post more often. Or maybe just having more free time to do so.
The SEB and I are on a spree of judeo-baroque listening recently, including Salomone Rossi, Fretwork, Quire of Voyces (look past the spelling to the singing), and Phillippe Jaroussky. This hereby replaces our earlier Ravel/Milhaud/Poulenc Chamber Music mix. I’ve also been revisiting Tsunami.
Jaroussky seems to have set his sites on Vivaldi as Scholl did on Handel.
Some relevant links:
“Ad Vitam Records”:http://www.advitam-records.com/gb/index.php – choral music to unite monotheists
“Brilliant Records”:http://music.brilliantclassics.com/ – like Naxos, but with more hardcore liner notes.
“Jaroussky in the obligatory Nisi Dominus showcase”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=VHJYNYi5N7o — check out how little he moves (physically) as he moves his voice through his crescendos. Damn.
What a lovely “article on Don Knuth”:http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/mayjun/features/knuth.html. Biella should really write a paper about how he is the epitome (and original) of a certain kind of hacker subjectivity.
Ther PNG blogosphere is actually pretty active although I have to admit that I don’t follow it as much as I should. Two new recent blogs by anthropologists working on PNG are worth noting, however — “Politics of Nature”:http://politicsofnature.wordpress.com/ by Jamon Halvaksz and “The Melanesian”:http://themelanesian.org/ by Andrew Moutu. Jamon’s has been around for a year or so while The Melanesian is much more recent and (in its two posts so far) has been the place where debates about the Frieda mine have spilled out of The National and onto the Internet, which is great. So check it/them out.
Being in France gives one lots of ideas for reading — after going to “Versailles”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521599598/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link to realizing how “French Theory”:http://www.amazon.com/French-Theory-Foucault-Transformed-Intellectual/dp/0816647321/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product spread “in the United States”:http://www.amazon.com/French-Theory-America-S-Lotringer/dp/0415925371/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product. At the same time one of the recent scandals here about “students prostituting themselves”:http://www.amazon.fr/prostitution-%C3%A9tudiante-nouvelles-technologies-communication/dp/2353410294/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214249456&sr=8-1 in order to pay their way through college which of course would never happen in the United States… uh… or “would it”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/23/stripper?
At the same time, there are the usual projects that continue to follow me around: “Early Kinship”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1405179015/ref=pe_5050_9414170_pe_snp_015 edited by Wendy James looks interesting, as does the new edition of “Identity and Control”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8672.html. Over at Savage Minds I’ve been turned on to “Malcolm McCullough”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mmmc/ and I have to admit I’m curious to see what Habermas has to say about “religion and science”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0745638252/ref=s9sims_c2_img1-rfc_g1-2991_g1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0E52FKZ118AKSTTM5QHA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=320448701&pf_rd_i=507846 — apparently this is a topic he’s taken up with the “Pope”:http://www.amazon.com/Dialectics-Secularization-Reason-Religion/dp/1586171666/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b. There are other things, further afield. I am not sure how successful this book on “taxidermy and colonialism”:http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/W/wakeham_taxidermic.html will be, although this “collection on consumption in the 17th and 18th century”:http://www.amazon.com/Consumption-World-Goods-Culture-Centuries/dp/0415114780/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product fields a lot of winners.
So “Koiari apologize for killing sevende missonary”:http://www.stanet.ch/apd/news/1841.html — a very different invocation of PNG’s past then that detailed in Lindstrom’s excellent “review article on the concept of ‘kastom’”:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a794152470~db=all?jumptype=alert&alerttype=new_issue_alert,email.
Oof. Major housecleaning and the blog is now running much more smoothly. In celebration here is a list of links I’ve been meaning to blog:
“The Social Effects of Native Title”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/c27_citation.html another superb ANU Eprint.
“Double Whammy of Disadvantage”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/16/first — some stats on the difficulty of staying in college if you are working and disadvantaged.
“David Price’s new book on anthropologists at war is out”:http://www.amazon.com/Anthropological-Intelligence-Deployment-American-Anthropology/dp/0822342375/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213370883&sr=8-1
“Danielle Allen on citizenship.”:http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Strangers-Anxieties-Citizenship-Education/dp/0226014673/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product
“The Age of American Unreason”:http://www.amazon.com/Age-American-Unreason-Susan-Jacoby/dp/0375423745/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213352457&sr=8-1
“Quiet Desperation of Academic Women”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/12/women
“The Last Professors”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/11/lastprofs
K that’s enough for now.
Iron Man is about America’s love affair with guns. It exults in the way that weapons and technology magnify power and amplify the ability to make the world safe, even as it shows how terrifying it can be to be target or victim of violence. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and because this is a post-9/11 movie, the line between Good and Evil is drawn ever more clearly, even as it cuts across familiar Cold War dichotomies. The conflict is not between good Americans and bad Foreigners, it is between the good Americans and foreigners versus the bad Americans and foreigners. Its a transecting of the usual alliances that makes the black and white morality of the movie more palatable.
Unlike a lot of superhero flicks, Iron Man really does bear comparison with Singer’s X-Men movies because both put the underlying themes of their source material in charge and harness the CGI and eye candy to them, rather than the other way around. The difference betwen Iron Man and X-Men, however, is that the underlying themes of X-Men are alienation and misunderstood powere, whereas the underlying theme of Iron Man is kicking ass and taking names.
But, like the obsession with guns, Tony Stark’s Hefneresque life style and gadgets could easily be part of a vapid cars-and-chicks summer block buster. And, of course, all of that is on display in the movie. But we also see a driven, obsessive genius — half Faust and half Edison (which mean, basically three quarters Faust) who, like all good Romantic Artists, externalizes his inner self in a work of art which (unlike the typical Romantic Artist) he then climbs back inside and uses to kick ass and take names. He is (for the first time since Revenge Of The Nerds?) a male role model who is both virile _and_ good at math and sciences. Although of course in an engineering, “working with my power tools in the garage” sort of way. It a combination that could fit together awkwardly, but which does manage to hang together mostly (I suspect) because of Robert Downey Junior. No one could redeem the keystone cops antics with the robots, but at least Robert Downey Jr. keeps them from being too embarassing. Equally, Gwyneth Paltrow (and some deft maneuvering by the screenplay) keeps Pepper Potts from being merely a doormat. And although Terrence Howard never quite gets the room he needs to become Tony’s moral compass, he does manage to become more than just the mandatory ‘Of Color’ member of the Scooby Gang.
Although its enages with the ambiguities of American power abroad and the military-industrial complex, it never ultimately escapes the idea that there are, in the end, good guys and bad guys. This is not the Marvel franchise with Film School ambitions to probe moral ambiguity. Iron Man is just as subtle as it has to be in order for you to enjoy the explosions — and Robder Downey Jr’s twitchy, charismatic delivery — with a clear consciensce.
There is now in existence an album of “Tom Waits covers by Scarlett Johansen”:http://www.imeem.com/scarlettjohansson.
I approached it with an open mind. Honestly.
“Bad times at Wafi and Hidden Valley”:http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jFPbETQHAXvVa1AUtcUKChU00v2g
“The new Jared Diamond piece in the New Yorker”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_diamond
Note to self: I fact-checked this.
“Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma”:http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=PVCzxtaSCXAC&dq=almost+englishmen+cernea&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=1au-tOAPMP&sig=9d9L8L2dlKoofvmyd1wLUpq4-Ig
“New Mexico’s Crypto-Jews: Image and Memory”:http://www.amazon.com/New-Mexicos-Crypto-Jews-Image-Memory/dp/0826342892
Also one strange (possibly wonderfully so) archeology journal: “Time and Mind”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/tmdj including “Biblical enthogens: a speculative hypothesis”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/tmdj/2008/00000001/00000001/art00004: “I am a
Jew who, though not observant, ?nds the Jewish textual heritage to be personally very meaningful. Following my experiences with Ayahuasca, I came to regard various aspects of the Jewish heritage from a new perspective…”
An article on “tourism in PNG”:http://www.smh.com.au/news/papua-new-guinea/the-last-frontier/2008/03/13/1205126091209.html from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Ok that came out wrong.
What I meant to say is: damn, if you had to own only one book by Philip K. Dick, “this would be the one”:http://www.amazon.com/Philip-K-Dick-Stigmata-Eldritch/dp/1598530097/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1205824664&sr=11-1 — the price is right (US$24) and the selection is superb. I imagine the intro from Lethem would be pretty good as well. If you’ve never read PKD before, go out and get this volume and put it under your pillow.
Or what would be your pillow if you didn’t exist solely as a paranoid fantasy of my own mind.
According to Inmet “the Ok Tedi strike is over”:http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssIndustryMaterialsUtilitiesNews/idUSN1439327920080314 and over at the “Sydney Morning Herald”:http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/png-pm-to-step-down-after-40-year-career/2008/03/15/1205472171792.html Michael Somare says he is stepping down. I do not keep my finger on the beating pulse of PNG politics, but my bet is that he’s figured out that it will be easier to rock the cradle when he’s not in it.
Workers at Ok Tedi Mine are “on strike”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/12/business/mine.php. Sounds like OTML’s attempt to retain engineers in the face of growing demand and low supply ended up upsetting everyone else.
A mix with piano interludes from the Boston School.
*Corn Meal Dance*
William Parker
*Leaving Again/In The Wee Small Hours*
Kurt Elling
_Lyric by Kurt Elling, based on Keith Jarrett’s untitled improvisation form his 1994 trio recording, “At The Blue Note”_
Sleeping / Waking / Crying / Leaving again / It’s morning / I have to go
Though every night pretends / begins in quiet hoping that it never ends / they’re always ending again / breaking another dream / a dream where we could breathe in the heavy curtained prairie air of summer night / watching lightning over wheat fields through a bedroom window /
And the prairie gently rose up with a feeling and embraced us
And when morning found us I pulled you to me and promised to stay
But that was the night / and now day
In the we small hours of the morning / while the whole wide world is fast asleep
You lie awake and think about the girl / and never ever think of counting sheep
And when your lonely heart has learned its lesson / you’d be hers if only she would call
For in the wee small hours of the morning / that’s the time you miss her most of all
*”Foss”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukas_Foss / For Lenny: Variations on New York New York*
*Ballad of Maxwell Demon*
Shudder to Think
Shudder to Think has always been one of my favorite bands, mostly because Craig Wedren is one of my heroes, vocally speaking. This track is from the soundtrack of Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haine’s movie version of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. Here Wedren channels Bowie (iirc) in a late-1990s modality while the performance is personated by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, dripping in desperate androgynous eroticism.
*Caffe-in*
Mario and Peaches
*Back in the Twentieth Century*
The Cutters
I discovered this fun track by accident — its the soundtrack to the preview movie for the virtual world “There”. The video shows beautiful avatars air-surfing and making out while this plays in the background.
*TV Party*
Black Flag
*New Logo*
Channels
(The?) Channels feature a lot of the line-up of Jawbox, another dischord classic. They rock, and this song in particular just demonstrates to me the sort of virtuosity that comes from veteran musicians who know how to rock live. Also the lyrics kick ass.
*”Fine”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Fine / Music for Piano 1: Prelude*
*Old Man of the Sea*
*Little Boy Billee*
*Cape Cod Girls*
These three songs come from the album Rogue’s Gallery, which happened when Johnny Depp decided to spend some karma points getting an album of traditional sea shanties and ballads made. Gore Verbinski flew to LA, New York, and London and holed up in a studio. Famous people came buy, put together the songs, and went nuts. The first and last of this set feature the incomparable Baby Gramps.
*We Both Go Down Together*
The Decembrists
*”Shapero”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shapero / Sonata No. 1 1. Allegro Preciso*
*Moody / Canticum Canticorum 1. Surge, propera amica mea*
From the Song of Solomon.
*Harvey / Come Holy Ghost*
I sang this for the first time on Pentecost.
*Whitacre / Cloudburst*
Setting an Octavio Paz text, this piece for chorus and a few instruments recreates exactly what it describes. The impulse verges on New Agey, and the implementation verges on gimmickry, but the overall effect is, I think, revelatory.
A helpful report on the state of the art on the doctorate from the Carnegie foundation. The book is available from Josey Bass but “the condensed version”:http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/dynamic/publications/elibrary_pdf_678.pdf is available as well.
Gold is getting ready to hit 1000, and “Lihir is getting ready to expand”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23299064-643,00.html
“Lucy Pickering”:http://uk.geocities.com/awfullysensible/ has a nice piece on “haole identity”:http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2006/76/haole.html/view?searchterm=pickering over at “Bad Subjects”:http://bad.eserver.org/
In case you were wondering where to find citations for the work of Michel Callon, there are pretty extensive lists “here”:http://www.csi.ensmp.fr/Perso/Callon/ and “here”:http://www.csi.ensmp.fr/index.php?page=PChercheurs&lang=&IdM=2
An interesting point of view on ‘SLOs’ by “Gerald Graff at Inside Higher Ed”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/21/graff
Oh and one more thing: “Thomas Popkewitch”:http://www.education.wisc.edu/ci/faculty/details.asp?id=popkewitz — interesting author on educational issues.
In my recent trip to Australia I was bowled over to find what a superb job the Australian government has done of digitizing its archives. Now you don’t need to trek out to the Australian War Memorial (which has a “blog”:http://blog.awm.gov.au/) — You can now view, digitized, the “ENTIRE ANGAU WAR DIARY”:http://www.awm.gov.au/diaries/ww2/folder.asp?folder=288 as well as many other records — I can’t be bothered to dig out the numbers now. Amazing.
I was also glad to be turned on to the work of “Geoffrey Grey”:http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2_no2/papers/cluttering_up_the_department/geoffrey_gray/ who has published on “Ronald Berndt and Sydney Uni’s collection of artifacts”:http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2_no2/papers/cluttering_up_the_department/, “the politics of anthropology in Australia”:http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/aboriginal_studies_press/find_a_book/recent_releases/a_cautious_silence and “the history of Australian anthropologists’ involvement in WWII”:http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=115&sid=6f1ae1aa-c9cc-4e87-a2a4-3059bc094641%40sessionmgr103 (sorry that last URL may be too crufty to work for you).
Superb, superb work in making research and records available.
Check out this fancy new site for “Milne Bay Tourism”:http://www.visitmilnebay.com/ — very nice indeed.
After earlier issues with a temporary closure it looks like “Lihir is back on track”:http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,23636,23131449-14334,00.html
This semester I’m teaching Weber’s essay on objectivity and social policy. It has been years since I read it — I can tell because all of my marginal notes are littered with references to Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno. One passage stood out to me:
“The fate of an epoch that has eaten from teh tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the _meaning_ of the world from the resutls of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself”
How much better a quote to use to discuss modernity than the one from Habermas’s lectures in _Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_. Better not only because it comes from a classical figure (and less likely to raise the hackles of someone who refuses to accept my definition of modernity because, for instance, they disagree with his use of Kohlberg or something) but also because of the invocation of the image of the tree of knowledge, which dovetails with not only my own interest in using the image of the Leviathan as it stretches back in times before Hobbes but also — and I somehow missed this earlier — because it also inadvertently references Ipili myths of the end of the world/start of gold mining, which begins when “birds from all over the world will come to eat the fruit of the tree at Warukari”.
I’ll have to be sure to riff that one out nicely in my book.
When I talk about mining to other academics the connection that they have with this form of primary industry are photographs of people working at mines — Sebastian Salgado’s work, typically. But here’s another one to give people some sense of what these things look like — “Edward Burtynsky’s photography of quarries, mines, etc.”:http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/index.html.
The thing about mines is that there’s no real way to understand how big they get until you are in one. These photos at least give you a sense of how awesome they are as aesthetic — and sometimes very sinister — objects.
Two journals that are new for me at least:
“Networking Knowledge”:http://journalhosting.org/meccsa-pgn/index.php/netknow/issue/view/1/showToc
and
“Cultural Sociology”:http://cus.sagepub.com/
“If the claim here is that all social situations are working overtime to avoid becoming standoffs, then perhaps we do indeed need a kind of metaphorical Hostage Rescue Team to periodically rescue hostage of social life from ourselves and each other” — Robin Wagner-Pacifici in _Theorizing The Standoff: Contingency In Action_
“Selective Remembrance”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/241516.ctl — a new edited volume on archaeology and national pasts.
“Digg is restructuring”:http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/01/24/digg-demonstrates-failure-open-collaborative-networks — part of the general Web 3.0 trend to create not just collaborative networks, but collaborative networks that help us flourish, which, it turns out, means structures that are regulated rather than ruthlessly games. I see this as similar somehow to the difference between early MMOGs, where inflation and gaming the system were seen as inevitable, to things like WoW, where ruthless policing has led to a more-or-less working system.
Damn, any feminization of the new mac laptop in “this review”:http://gizmodo.com/348361/our-macbook-air-review-matrix? Must write longer blog entry comparing this to seminal article “When computers were women”.
Its official — World of Warcraft has “over 10 million players”:http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080122005155&newsLang=en — 2.5 in the US, 2 in the EU and 5 million in Asia. Quick and easy statistics!
I’ve thought a lot about locating cultural creativity, and then by chance the other day I found it — its call number is GN453!
“It’s Comforting To Know That No Matter What You Do In Life, It Will Never Be As Awesome As This Picture “:http://www.unc.edu/~jmspille/images/awesome3.jpg
Also in re: the continuing expansion of the WoW Activity System: “WoW Radio”:http://www.wcradio.com/
“Passion gap”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/07/grad — keeping grad students’ eyes on the prize: the joy of research.
I knew about the “ASOPA website”;http://www.asopa.com.au/ for some time, but didn’t know there was a “blog”:http://asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/ as well. Awesome.
loosely-joined links from morning reading: “Preparing future faculty”:http://www.preparing-faculty.org/. “John Lofland”:http://sociology.ucdavis.edu/people/jlofland (featuring bonus Davis links), “Carl Couch”:http://cccsir.org/Who_was_Carl_Couch%3F.html and “Gerald Davis’s edited volume on social movements”:http://www.amazon.com/Movements-Organization-Cambridge-Contentious-Politics/dp/0521548365/ref=reader_req_dp.
And its called “Methods Man.com”:http://methodsman.com/ — some usefuls stuff on qualitative research and his own experiences. Still… it makes me wonder if he knows about “the other guy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_Man.
Two volumes on a topic I will probably not have time to deal with until retirement:
” The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion, and the Chinese Martial Arts
“:http://0-www.uhpress.hawaii.edu.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/cart/shopcore/?db_name=uhpress&page=shop/flypage&product_id=5309&category_id=b3e6237d1b1b3b8594488ed1c40d0dfb&PHPSESSID=815beb845cfdf2ead27aaeca2280fb46
By Meir Shahar
and, on the lighter side
“American Shaolin”:http://www.mattpolly.com/polly-books.htm
By Matt Polly — much more a genre piece.
Two quick stories on investors and executives in the mining industry and how it relates to PNG: “Graham Briggs, the new CEO of Harmony”:http://www.miningmx.com/gold_silver/758726.htm and “Nautilus’s Russian Billionair shareholder”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2008/01/03/russians-pacific-punt/
Another illegal miner has been shot in Porgera — there is coverage at “The National”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/010208/Nation%205.htm and “The Age”:http://news.theage.com.au/illegal-miner-shot-dead-in-png/20080102-1jun.html
The European Group for Organization Studies (aka ‘EGOS’) has a “website”:http://www.egosnet.org/ and publishes the journal “Organization Studies”:http://oss.sagepub.com — there is a “free issue”:http://oss.sagepub.com/content/vol27/issue12/ available. Interesting stuff.
This time the New York Times reports on “Korean internet addiction recover centers”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/technology/18rehab.html?_r=2&ref=business&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
MIT has published “The Ecology of Games”:http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/dmal/-/3?cookieSet=1 which features a bevy of Macarthur-sponsored, usual-suspect authored papers on games and learning.
I’m fascinated by theorycrafting websites and was just turned on to “maxdps.com”:http://maxdps.com/ — amazing geekery.
“Celia Pearce”:http://cpandfriends.com/
For a paper I’m working on:
“The New England Town of men’s deepest aspirations was a utopia: a corporate body free from power-seeking, from conflict, from hard bargaining among separate interests, from exploitation of the week; free, in short, from politics. But there was no eliminating the facts of private ambition and group hostilities from social life. Colonial yankees strove instead to overcome them through their “precepts of peace” and, failing that, to escape them through a distinctive style of politics by denial. Men stood for office by renouncing ambitions, all the while discretely publicizing their availability among friends.” — The Minute Men and Their World pg. 14-15
There’s another good quote in there about how individual and collective are miraculously harmonized but now I can’t find it.
Just in case you missed it, while I was away PNG has faced one of its most major natural disasters in years: “tropical cyclone Guba”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601081&sid=amp_W1VamMGs&refer=australia
In other news “macroeconomic indicators continue to look good”:http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/11/19/afx4353296.html
“Sociological discourse of the relational: the cases of Bourdieu & Latour”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00749.x
Here’s a PNG story that has been making headlines recently, “malaria climbs into highlands PNG”:http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/09/asia/AS-GEN-Bali-Climate-Quiet-Scourge.php. Mostly its a write up of some PNGIMR research. I appreciate the fact that it lacks the usual “ooohh ahhh they’re cannibals” extremism that too often populates news stories about PNG. It even gets myths of malaria right — in Porgera people thought that if you went down to the low altitude areas (the _wapi_) you’d get sick and become a sorcerer with incredibly long fingernails. So there you go.
Here’s a “special issue on mining and corporate responsibility”:http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/greenleaf/journaldetail.kmod?productid=2644&keycontentid=8 with many of the articles available in PDF.
A quick note — I’ve moved from my old Textdrive server to the new Textdrive-absorbing Joyent server. So there will be some outages as I move stuff over from one server to the other but on the positive side: MUCH faster load times.
I have always known, deep in my heart, that John Burton had the heart and soul of a blogger. But his recent blog, despite the occasional entry that is “incomprehensible”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/29/frightenstein-drives-stake-into-sinking-atolls/#more-529 (at least to those of us who are not aging commonwealthers) are “furniture chewing”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/26/cross-cultural-misunderstanding-and-4wds/ at “its very best”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/31/hacks-move-decimal-point-again/.
Here’s an ‘article of the day’ link:
“ools for the Disempowered? Indigenous Leverage Over Mining Companies”:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a783628719?jumptype=alert&alerttype=new_issue_alert,email
Abstract:
Rather than passively accepting development, some Indigenous communities have forced their demands into corporate decision-making. Accordingly, recognising and responding to community expectations becomes a matter of prudent strategy and ‘enlightened self-interest’. This paper examines the case of Century Zinc Mine in Queensland’s Gulf of Carpentaria where the miner undertook negotiations and reached agreement with local Indigenous communities. It was later held to account by communities concerned about insufficient implementation of this agreement. Discussion then explores the campaign against Jabiluka uranium mine in Australia’s Northern Territory, especially why multinational miner Rio Tinto deferred to local community wishes surrounding development. These experiences show that Indigenous communities are most effective in bringing leverage over mining companies when they impact upon profit or future profit (often related to reputation with specific audiences). The parameters and consequent limitations of a company’s responsiveness to community demands reinforce fundamental roles for the state as ultimate regulator and provider.
Here are some links about the First Contact trilogy that I may use later on this semester:
“An obituary of Robin Anderson”:http://www.aftrs.edu.au/index.cfm?objectid=D2EB0A32-D0B7-4CD6-F92A1DC2894B1500
“Degrees of Otherness: A Close Reading of First Contact”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/var.1994.10.2.55?journalCode=var — from Visual Anthropology Review
“Alice Marwick”:http://www.tiara.org/blog/?page_id=299 studies identity online.
“Passively Multiplayer”:http://passivelymultiplayer.com/ — the PMOG blog.
Its official — “Barrick is buying into Kainantu”:http://www.barrick.com/News/PressReleases/2007/BarricktoAcquireHighlyProspectivePropertiesinPNG/default.aspx.
There a “new joint venture between Triple Plate and Barrick”:http://www.rttnews.com/sp/breakingnews.asp?date=10/22/2007&item=16
Sounds like interesting work — here a potted literature review.
“Making Scenes”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-4115-4 — the forthcoming book from Duke
“The dissertation”:http://library.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=baulch%2C+emma&SL=None&Search_Code=NALL&PID=Uc18Fq64z00WiEseC5ZRb8VTD&SEQ=20071025044256&CNT=20&HIST=1 at Monash Uni in Australia
“Gesturing elsewhere: the identity politics of the Balinese death/thrash metal scene”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=F12901585295FC895B531E67A2479BF0.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=163351
“Creating a scene: Balinese punk’s beginnings”:http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/153
“The McDonaldisation of Bali”:http://www.sustainability.murdoch.edu.au/casestudies/Case_Studies_Asia/bali_2/csmcdon.htm
“‘Post Imperial’ Globalization and Balinese Alternative Music”:http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/Abstracts/Baulchpaper.pdf
“Alternative music and mediation in late New Order Indonesia”:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a713768254~db=all~order=page
“Punks, rastas and headbangers: Bali’s Generation X”:http://insideindonesia.org/edit48/emma.htm
It looks like “Oil Search is going with Exxon”:http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKSYD9861820071023 on the LNG project.
“The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism”:http://www.amazon.com/Invention-World-Religions-Universalism-Preserved/dp/0226509893/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/105-4927962-4957223 by T. Masuzawa
“Allies for Armageddon”:http://www.amazon.com/Allies-Armageddon-Rise-Christian-Zionism/dp/0300116985/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193103521&sr=8-1 — book on Christian zionists by a journalist
“The Hebrew God”:http://www.amazon.com/Hebrew-God-Portrait-Ancient-Deity/dp/0300090250/ref=sr_1_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193103565&sr=8-1 by Bernhard Lang — “in my copious free time”
“Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization”:http://www.amazon.com/Bound-Together-Preachers-Adventurers-Globalization/dp/0300112017/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193103631&sr=8-1 — looks promising.
ANU’s Artisinal mining research center has “online papers”:http://www.asmasiapacific.org/documentsview.aspx
“Charles Ellwood”:http://www2.asanet.org/governance/ellwood.html — the last of the pre-Parsonian sociological synthesizers
“Stephen Turner’s vita”:http://isis.fastmail.usf.edu/fair/save/displayvita.asp?emplid=00000019055 — his article in the Levine festschrift on “The Maturity of Social Theory” is superb.
“Rudolf Sohm”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-4189(198004)60%3A2%3C185%3ARSOC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2 — the guy Weber got ‘charisma’ from
“Joseph Bensman on bureaucracy”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/x8ggw3n16597n707/?p=a51d8e0ad49c4fc4807b17abdc94991c&pi=4
“Guy Oakes on Weber and the southwest German school”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/p54g804550574085/?p=a51d8e0ad49c4fc4807b17abdc94991c&pi=7 as well as “his response to comments”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/w5374583vm73k048/?p=a816ee5bf3fe42408031c3d31cc709c1&pi=11
“Eva Illouz”:http://sociology.huji.ac.il/illouz.html — someone else for me to read.
I’ve never had a very high opinion of James Watson as a person, but “the current stir about his racist remarks”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071018/ap_on_re_eu/britain_controversial_scientist crosses the line from merely stupid to down-right teacheable.
“The Tarde-Durkheim Conference”:http://www.tarde-durkheim.net/Conference.htm — a theoretical tendency becomes a movement by forging a disciplinary history
“Economic Sociology, the European version”:http://econsoc.mpifg.de/ — check out the newsletter.
Additional works I noticed and will never have time to read:
“War and Human Civilization”:http://www.amazon.com/War-Human-Civilization-Azar-Gat/dp/0199262136/ref=sr_1_4/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192742547&sr=8-4: If you had to read one book on War, I guess this would be it.
“The Body Multiple”:http://www.amazon.com/Body-Multiple-Ontology-Practice-Cultural/dp/0822329174/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192743363&sr=8-1 by Annemarie Mol — medical anthro
“The American Faculty”:http://www.amazon.com/American-Faculty-Restructuring-Academic-Careers/dp/0801882834/ref=sr_1_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192743435&sr=8-1, the definitive book of my profession
This is Extreme Bibliography Geekery: not only is Rowan and Littlefield having a 40% off sale at the moment, but they are “now browseable on Google Books”:http://rowmanblog.typepad.com/rowman/2007/08/rowman-littlefi.html! Is it sad that I am so totally psyched by this? Now I can finally browse the “Imperial Maine and Hawai’i”:http://books.google.com/books/p/rowman_littlefield?id=qHilua4CqjwC&pg=PA62&dq=imperial+maine&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=YvIet28fP6u0r_w5WbiTFq9YIsE#PPA61,M1 online! Huzzah!
“Papua New Guinea delegation donates gold for rebuilding Temple”:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3457263,00.html
The new issue of Ethnography has a “special section on middle managers in global firms”:http://eth.sagepub.com/content/vol8/issue3/ including an article by John Hassard.
Oops. InterOil shares drop 25% as “Elk 2 comes up dry”:http://communities.canada.com/nationalpost/blogs/tradingdesk/archive/2007/10/03/interoil-shares-fall-on-suspension-of-elk-2-well.aspx
Two books on the state end of the tripod:
“State Formation and Political Legitimacy”:http://books.google.com/books?id=mgDBG5zu1xYC&pg=PA85&dq=ideology+and+the+formation+of+early+states&sig=Vj2weuV1Rp-ZhFPTfGgDquwqm8A#PPP1,M1
“Ideology and the formation of early states”:http://books.google.com/books?id=rtwxaNSsMbUC&pg=PP1&dq=ideology+and+the+formation+of+early+states&sig=jyyxLii9wt9lbA3TjgsRHHB_V0w#PPR5,M1
A fat book on “The Origins of the European Economy”:http://www.amazon.com/Origins-European-Economy-Communications-Commerce/dp/0521661021/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product/105-4927962-4957223
The CFP for the “International Journal of Role Playing”:http://play.blogs.com/rp/ …
…And the mysterious “journalhosting.org”:http://journalhosting.org/
I’ve always sort of wondered by happened to Sean Young and why she didn’t become the next Julia Roberts. Then to my surprise the other day I picked up Entertainment Weekly (yes, I read Entertainment Weekly) to find a whole article on “what happened to Sean Young and why she is not Julia Roberts”:http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20056516,00.html. I find the piece fascinating.
On a related note, Wired also has a “great interview with Ridley Scott on Blade Runner”:http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-10/ff_bladerunner_full?currentPage=all which is fascinating not just because Blade Runner (and hence Sean Young) are fascinating, but because about half way through it the interviewer and Scott start arguing (in the good sense of this term) what the movie is or isn’t about and what does or doesn’t happen in it. It is often the case that creators — who are supposed to know ‘what their art is about’ — reconstrue and refigure their work when talking to others, but it is actually pretty hard to find written examples of this. So I think this article would be good to teach, actually — it lets students see that creators don’t have an interpretive lock on their work and gives a good sense of what discussion of a work is about.
And on a related note — related to glossy publishing and fallen celebrities at any rate — I must also note the guilty pleasure “Vanity Fair’s article on Christopher Hitchens”:http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/10/hitchens200710 gave me.
“Armand Mattelart”:http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/mattelart_invention.html studies communication
The “Media Ecology Association”:http://www.media-ecology.org/awards/2007awards.html filters content.
“Influences on Max Weber’s Methodology’:http://asj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/1/15
Two pieces of PNG-related news today that may have escaped the normal radar. First, “Laurie Critchley has finished a documentary on Dan Leahy’s wives”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv–radio/a-tale-of-papuan-polygamy/2007/09/25/1190486315171.html which would make a _great_ edition to my First Contact course — can anyone tape this for me?
Second, “there’s a new racquet club in town”:http://www.openpr.com/news/29147/Papua-New-Guinea-welcomes-the-Airways-Health-and-Racquet-Club.html: Will the Aviat be overthrown, or is Jackson’s too far away from Town to lure people out? Only time will tell….
UPDATE: Here’s the URL for the “Leahy family documentary”:http://www.abc.net.au/dynasties/special.htm
Check out this “phat new issue of Anthropological Forum”:http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/spissue/canf-si.asp! Gratz to all contributors — it looks like it will be fantastic.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ethnography of the academy lately because of the upcoming ‘history of theory’ class that I’ll be teaching, so I recently stumbled across Becher and Trowler’s “Academic Tribes and Territories”:http://www.amazon.com/Academic-Tribes-Territories-Intellectual-Disciplines/dp/033520628X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190675133&sr=8-1 which I should read. Some day. *sigh*….
Welcome to 5768 all — may you have a sweet new year.
I trust “Robert Ulin”:http://www.wmich.edu/anthropology/ulin.html to write good books, and I’m sure “Vintages and Traditions”:http://www.amazon.com/VINTAGES-TRADITIONS-Smithsonian-Ethnographic-Inquiry/dp/156098628X/ref=sr_1_3/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190419803&sr=1-3 is a good one. I figure if you are going to study ‘the invention of tradition’ grand crus would be the way to go. I’ll teach it someday…
342 messages in the thread right now — a true piece of Outsider Art: “how could they do that to our shoulder?”:http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1272322392&sid=1
Some news on mining in PNG:
“Yandera prospect looks good”:http://www.wabusinessnews.com.au/en-story/1/56861/Marnego-forecasts-Yandera-production-by-2011 — they’re forecasting production in 2011.
“Harmony is looking for cash for Hidden Valley”:http://www.mineweb.net/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page504?oid=27296&sn=Detail
and last but not least: “China National Petroleum Corporation is eyeing Oil Search”:http://www.forbes.com/markets/2007/09/17/cnpc-oil-search-markets-equity-cx_jc_0917markets04.html
Some random highlights of my scan of the Intarweb today:
“S&P upgrades Papua New Guinea’s economic rating”:http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/09/14/afx4117637.html
“Mr.Pip”:http://www.amazon.com/Mister-Pip-Lloyd-Jones/dp/0385341067/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190079919&sr=8-1, a novel set in Bougainville, has been nominated for a Man-Booker prize.
A new study on “college students use of IT”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/17/it — they pretty much all have access to computers now.
“Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/sale/pages/10150.html — a good book about California
“Norton Antivirus”:http://www.myspace.com/spleeng — I love him/her/it. VERY hard to google for additional tracks however
A BBC article on “post-WoW mmogs”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6619875.stm is the leaping off point for a new Gamasutra article entitled “The Academics Speak: Is There Life After Worlds of Warcraft”:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1675/the_academics_speak_is_there_life_.php?page=1 which features, among others, “Jeff McNeill”:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1675/the_academics_speak_is_there_life_.php?page=3
Kaloo-kalay! The PNGIMR has, bless their hearts, “digitized back issues of the PNG Medical Journal”:http://www.pngimr.org.pg/medicaljournals.htm! A high-quality, hard-to-find journal is now available and open to all. Good job PNIMR!!
I love The Contemporary Pacific, and I was glad to see that they have open access’d “a great issue of indigenous studies”:http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/cp/CP132.html. James Clifford, Geoff White, Ty Tengan, John Osorio, Teresia Teaiwa, etc. etc. Good stuff!
China.org has a “new piece”:http://www.china.org.cn/english/China/222358.htm on Internet addiction with some useful links in the sidebar. Of course it comes out just days _after_ I turn in my paper on Internet addiction. Ah well, I guess life keeps going whether your article does or not…
It looks like the “threatened strike at Lihir”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20070831/news03.htm is actually “on and affecting world gold prices”:http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=goldMktRpt&storyID=2007-08-31T055314Z_01_SP269982_RTRIDST_0_MARKETS-PRECIOUS-UPDATE-1-CORRECTED.XML.
The superb first paragraph of the acknowledgments of Steve Johnstone’s _Disputes and Democracy: The Consequences of Litigation in Ancient Athens_:
The difficulty is not beginning, it is knowing where to end. Ordinarily, the boundaries seem clear. Readers think of a book as a discrete object, the product of a single author, a commodity, a physical thing, an elaborated argument. As an author, however, “my book” does not primarily describe the object you are holding but one of the principles that has organized my life for many years, a kind of askesis or discipline. I do not think first of my claims about Athenian litigation but about my writing routine: By 7 each morning I am at work at my desk, which sits in a sweeping bay window looking east over the stacked houses in Noe Valley. After at least two hours work, about the time the fog begins to thin, I walk down 24th street, stopping for coffee and to read the morning paper. I time the rest of my morning by the shouts of children at recess at 10 and 12 across the street at St. Philip’s School, and so on. This peculiar, sometimes even obsessive, discipline has governed not only my own life but those of the people around me as well. Thus, there are many I want to thank not only for supporting me in this project but also for acquiescing themselves to the discipline of the book.
Having just completed an article, I suppose it is too late to go back and site “Internet and self-regulation in China: the cultural logic of controlled
commodification”:http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/29/5/772?etoc by “Ian Weber”:http://comm.tamu.edu/people/profiles/weber.html
“Psychedelic White”:http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/saldanha_psychedelic.html — sounds interesting but I’m already too far in to the semester to think I’ll have time to read something so off-topic. Ah well, to file away for later I suppose.
Timothy Oliphant.
Joss Whedon.
Man From Atlantis remake.
You heard it here first.
In like two years I am for sure going to teach the first chapter from this book. But I might forget about it before then so here is a link now to it — about how to do fieldwork in France about witchcraft: “Deadly Words”:http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Words-Witchcraft-Bocage-Msh/dp/0521297877/ref=sr_1_1/103-6905344-2487020?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187812455&sr=8-1
‘Tis the season for the Western Highlands and Enga cultural shows. The “BBC has some pictures”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6956504.stm.
Article of the day: “Friends don’t let friends listen to corporate rock”:http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/4/438?etoc
“Picasso’s Old Guitar Player”:http://www.nhusd.k12.ca.us/kit/students/student%20web%20pages/Student%20Work/Fermin/bond.html — scanning it, it looks unremarkable… until you get to the end…
I always encourage my students (and myself) to write well — beautifully, clearly, and intelligbly. So when I picked up _Dark Light_ by Linda Simon I thought to myself: “that we should all write this well.” Check out the first paragraph of her book:
This book is about a particular historical moment: the advent of electrification in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is a book about energies, and the many and surprising ways that term was understood at the time; and about illumination, of public and private spaces, of the human body, and of the spirit and the mind. It is a book about anxieties generated by technological innovation, and because of that, besides being about the past, it is about us, now. As we respond to new technologies — human cloning, for example, or genetic engineering — we carry with us an inheritance from those who gazed with fascination and trepidation at the first incandescent bulb, and at the astounding shadowy image of their bones, made visible by an inexplicable dark ray. _Dark Light_ offers us a way to reflect upon our response, to illuminate who we once were, and to imagine who we might become.
Perfect. You know what the book is about, you know why it is important, and you immediately want to read more. That we should all write this well!
I’ve updated the “things I’ve written”:http://alex.golub.name/log/things-ive-written/ page to include two new articles that have appeared recently. Just FYI.
Here’s “a potential resource for teaching”:http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55869?fulltext=true — often times when I begin to ask my students about race and genetics one or two in the class will analogize human racial difference to dog breeds. At first I thought this was shocking, but over time I found it was a useful response — most students imagined dog breeds, like human racial difference, to be the result of evolution. But in fact variation in dog size is a classic example of culture shaping biology and not the other way around. Canine sexual reproduction is culturally organized (i.e. by breeders) just as human reproduction is shaped by cultural forces, and the incredible variation in size and shape of dogs dates only to the Victorian. And as “Rebecca Cassidy”:http://books.google.com/books?id=A-QYXw9Wl9YC&dq=sport+of+kings+rebecca+cassidy&pg=PP1&ots=DCnV7PcL2z&sig=iPNyFJAq1a6QuFm66w054CSIhQA&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Dsport%2Bof%2Bkings%2Brebecca%2Bcassidy%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26aq%3Dt%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title has shown, ‘breeding’ is a culturally-specific preoccupation which cuts across species, class, and (of course) ‘race’.
If I had to explain briefly what I have been thinking about lately, it is this: how we might subsume a Melanesian emphasis on dynamism, disjuncture, and change under a Benjaminian-Baudelairian notion of ‘modernity’ rather than the older tropes of cargo cult or (more simply) ’savagery’. I think it took me a little bit to figure out that this was what I was doing because my starting point was Levi-Strauss’s distinction between hot and cold societies, which cuts in odd ways across the Weber-Marx notion of modernity as institutional rationalization and the Benjamin-Baudelaire notion of innovation and self-forging. It is all a bit confusing because mining companies imagine themselves as ‘developed’ in a way that cuts across all three of these scholarly topoi.
The “latest edition of New Media and Society”:http://nms.sagepub.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/content/vol9/issue4/ is a special issue on women and games/The Intarweb featuring an article by “Shoshana Magnet”: on “Suicide Girls”:http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/577. Very Boing-Boing.
This piece on “13th Mask Festival”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20070810/weekend01.htm at Rabaul touches briefly on one of my own interests — how Papua New Guineans understand their own ‘traditional culture’.
Sssshhh…. don’t tell Barrick, but “one of their employees is blogging”:http://davidwillms.blogspot.com/ about life in Porgera. This is great for me, since the group that I had least access to during my research in Porgera was expatriate miners. It makes for interesting reading about what a white miner thinks about the “crazies” that live “on the other side of the fence” at Porgera, something I don’t know much about since my specialty was living with said crazies. Williams is right that Porgerans consider white people chewing betelnut hilarious, but I am not sure about the two Ps he put in “Ippili” and the two Gs in “cigarette.”
I actually feel bad pointing up this blog. I have no idea what PJV’s policy on blogging is but I imagine that too much publicity will just get thing thing rolled up by management.
Ah one more quick link: a “new IHE column from me”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/06/21/golub
Here’s one more piece from Reuters on “the AMA’s attempt to pathologize playing video games”:http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN2425415820070624?sp=true.
Now for a little self-promotion: I’m very proud to announce the publication of Customary Land Tenure In Australia and Papua New Guinea by the Australian National University Press, which includes a piece by me entitled “From Agency to Agents: Forging Landowners Identities in Porgera”. It is a great volume edited by Katie Glaskin and Jimmy Weiner — both prominent in Australian circles — and the contributors list is a who’s who of people who have been active in policy, anthropology, and activism surrounding customary land registration.
But best of all: the entire book available open access so you can “read it in its entirely online”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/customary_citation.html in either “PDF”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/pdf_instructions.html or “HTML”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/html/frames.php. For instance, you can “get my article here”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/apem/customary/pdf/ch05.pdf.
Working with Jimmy and Katie has been a good experience — this volume has gone through peer review from outside readers, is professionally copy-edited, and has high production values. It is available print-on-demand as well as online. The ANU press is, to a certain extent, neither fish not fowl as a press, and so it demonstrates how open access is not an either-or proposition but enables a variety of different — and very flexible — publishing models. Check it out!
Just for the record, Barrick has a “page responding to CorpWatch”:http://www.barrick.com/CorporateResponsibility/TheFactsCorpWatch/default.aspx (also available as a “PDF”:http://www.barrick.com/Theme/Barrick/files/docs_pressrelease/2007.05.11-TheFactsandCorpWatch.pdf) discussing specific allegations. Looking Barrick’s material over quickly, however, I don’t see anything specifically about Porgera in it.
More on the activist front — there is now a “protestbarrick.net”:http://www.protestbarrick.net/ website with information about Barrick and campaigns against it.
Here’s Julian’s piece on “gold farming in China”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html?ex=1183089600&en=1e6c650df0b49c03&ei=5070 as well as some “errata”:http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/recalculating-t.html.
And speaking of errata, “so much for Internet addiction”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/fun.games/06/25/addiction.video.games.reut/index.html
I’ve been away on vacation for two weeks and am now combing through the fortnight of noosphere that I missed. Here’s a brain dump of links I’ve not read yet:
“Enga ‘Rambo’ Slain”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/062707/nation6.htm
“Love on Campus”:http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/love-deresiewicz.html
“Change and difference are not what separate us or tear us apart but the constituents of what glues us together — the very dynamic of all social process” — Neil Blair Christensen, _Inuit in Cyberspace_
PNG is often described using ‘primitizing’ metaphors like ’stone age’, ‘ancient’ and so forth. But it doesn’t get much more literal than this: “Ropens: Live Pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea”:http://www.ropens.com/.
Inside Higher Ed is running a “piece on a new study about ratemyprofessor.com”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/05/rmp. If you want to skip directly to the two papers that they’ve sited, I’ve added some quick links here:
“Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on RateMyProfessors.com”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918283 by Felton et. al.
“Ratemyprofessor.com versus formal in-class student evaluations of teaching”:http://pareonline.net/pdf/v12n6.pdf by Coladarci and Kornfield
Here I am today, sixty-two years beyond my beginning, the embodiement — refugee, survivor, and witness — of the forces that have moved across and within my life. As I survey this pastness that belongs to me alone, this unique tangle of public-private, shared-solitary, accidental-intentional, known-unknown that is my life-so-far what I long to find is some particualrity, soem singularity that makes it not only in fact, but in truth, mine. I search for a _point_, a a meaning; and the truth is that if there is a meaning, I _am_ the meaning. And where is meaning found? It is found in the search for truth.
The truth I have in mind to for is not the sort that, once you find it, you can have it wrapped to go. And once you get it home it fits right in and it never wears out. My view of truth is, first that there is such a thing and, second, I can approach it only if I keep in mind the impossibility of grasping it. The truth that interests me is problematica, partial modest — and still breathing. It is not normally dramatic or revelatory, and its attainment depends far more o nthinking hard than feeling freely. To put it another way: I think that speaking truthfully is a more fitting ambition than speaking the truth.
–Leslie Farber (heavily edited)
Scott McLeod has written a “brief piece on professors who blog”:http://techlearning.com/showArticle.php?articleID=196604461 which features a few quotes from me in it. Its good — I wish I had the paper magazine which, afaik, has the longer version of the piece.
Hellboy is still my favorite movie by Guillermo del Toro, but his “interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7000935 about Pan’s Labyrinth gives it a run for its money. Since I’ve been thinking about what it means for a corporation to be the moral author of your actions, I was particularly struck by this quote from him:
I find that type of obedience, where you find refuge in the corporate or when you find refuge in the political or the religious majority is such an absolutely despicable cowardice. That is the cowardice the captain [in Pan's Labyrinth] displays by making the others nonhuman so he can torture or kill them. I think that every time you turn towards a truth that is not your own, that you confide the guidance of your soul to somebody else’s choices, you are making a huge mistake.
Originality grows at the margin of the incessant repetition of the familiar – Gyorgy Ligeti
13 designs to choose from! The “WoW Visa”:http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/visa/. Just when you thought virtual economies and real economies couldn’t get any more intertwined…
Here’s a space I know about but have never explored (read: perfect BA or MA project): all these graphical chat spaces like “Zwinky”:http://zwinky.smileycentral.com/, “Stardolls”:http://www.stardoll.com/en/, “Gaia”:http://gigaom.com/2007/04/22/move-over-myspace-gaia-online-is-here and “all the others”:http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/kids-and-teens-have-pushed-at-least-6-immersive-online-worlds-to-over-2m-uumth-in-the-us/.
If anyone figures all this out, let me know.
The new “Sinivit gold mine”:http://www.newguineagold.ca/Sinivit.html in East New Britain is now online and their first gold pour is expected for May. For some photos of what the start of a gold mine looks like check out “the press release”:http://www.newguineagold.ca/PressReleases2007.html#apr30. This is Baining, Jane Fajans country but I have no idea what their social impact work was like or how community affairs is constructed or anything.
Looking at these pictures of systematic destruction of the natural environment it occurs to me how desensitized I’ve become to what mining does to the environment. It is sort of like the Rodney King effect — defense attorneys who defended policemen who beat up King had to decide how to deal with the explosive video tape of them beating him. The strategy — iirc — was not to avoid the tape, but to show it to the jury over and over and over again until it was no longer shocking to them. It is sort of amazing to see images of once-forested ridges stripped of all life and ready to get ground into bits and turned into shiny gold bars. Every fork and spoon in our house got dug out of the ground the exact same way. Except, of course, the plastic ones. But anyway.
I am trying to blog more and more regularly. Can you tell? This entry is about how beautiful the “new OI website”:http://oi.uchicago.edu/ is. Always nice to see a Hittite dictionary project get the website it deserves.
Looks like Porgera has halted operations temporarily — more at “The Nation”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/042507/nation2.htm and “The Post”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20070427/business.htm
“Barrick has bought Emperor’s equity in Porgera”:http://www.canadianminingjournal.com/issues/ISArticle.asp?id=67959&issue=04222007 — which means its just them and in-country equity now in Porgera.
I admit: “Battlestar Galactica Credits, WoW Style”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfeYnI_lvYA&mode=related&search=
Every so often anthropologists are asked questions about historical linguistics — typically something like “The words X, Y, and Z in these two languages are spoken in different areas of world — proof of alien colonization, perhaps?!?!?” The answer is: of course not — the Mayan sysadmins who first seeded our green world of clocks with our kind scrambled our neuronal cortex in order to erase all such clues. C’mon folks — these guys were _professionals_. The other main answer to give people is some sense of what historical linguists do — for which I just want to bookmark here “How do linguists decide how languages are related”:http://www.zompist.com/lang9.html#10 as well as “Deriving Proto-world with tools you probably have at home”:http://www.zompist.com/proto.html and “How likely are chance resemblances between languages?”:http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm all of them over at Zompist.com. I first got on to these writings in the course of tracking down the relationship between “Quechua”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua and “Hutese”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huttese_language (the later is modeled on the former) and rather than googling around forever for them again I thought I’d make a note of them here as I’m currently attempting to explain to someone that there is no phylogenetic relationship between Berber and Hawaiian (other than the well-developed 19th century notions of a semitic origin for Polynesian people, some of which have sort of sunk into the culture around here).
It’s made its way around the Internet for some time now, but Kathleen’s recent invocation of “Terry Eagleton’s scathing review of Richard Dawkins’s book”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html finally got me to sit through the whole thing and I must admit it is a fascinating document. As a point of academic bloodspot it is superb, of course, and the piece also interesting for those of us who remember earlier incarnations of Terry Eagleton…
Here’s an article from Islands Business on “Chinese in Papua New Guinea”:http://www.islandsbusiness.com/islands_business/index_dynamic/containerNameToReplace=MiddleMiddle/focusModuleID=17355/overideSkinName=issueArticle-full.tpl and how the long-time Chinese expat community and the growing PRC presence in PNG is playing in national politics.
There is a nice “TLS piece on the new translation of Madness and Civilization”:http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25347-2626687,00.html. It spends a lot of time dissing Foucault’s scholarship, which is sort of interesting if you read Foucault for the ‘theory’ and have been going along assuming that it wouldn’t matter if “everything Foucault said was wrong”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/nh4t51v6u2681102/.
Behold: “Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations”:http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/03/even_more_multitouch_screen.html and “Beyond the Body Proper”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3845-1!
I just wish we could see the TOCs on these guys…
Besides having a crazily multicultural name, “Tarik O’Regan”:http://www.tarikoregan.com/ is one of the best new composers I’ve listened to in a long time. And best of all he writes extensively for Choir and does rip mix burn thing with chant and early music. Highly recommended.
When I was a graduate student one of the other graduate students had stuck the following quote from Max Weber on the door of their office in big black letters:
Academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief?
But recently I looked up the full, unexpurgated version, and it reads quite a bit differently:
Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation, the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says, _give up any hope_. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few persons could endure this situation without coming to grief. This much I deem necessary to say about the external conditions of the academic man’s vocation. But I believe that actually you wish to hear of something else, namely, of the inward calling for science…
It’s sort of a telling difference, don’t you think?
David Martinez of “CorpWatch”:http://www.corpwatch.org/ has just finished an “article on the Porgera gold mine”:http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14381 which summarizes a longer report (I haven’t read the report yet — just the article on the website). I emailed him back and forth for a bit and I’m quoted a few times in the story. Its worth reading if you are interested in Porger and particularly how debates in the valley get picked up and circulated in international fora — check out the “cartoon”:http://www.corpwatch.org/img/original/Papua.jpg that came with the article. Is it just me or is the mountain gendered female in the picture? This fits in well with the idea of the exploitation of ‘mother earth’ familiar with first world activists but not with Ipili conceptions of Kupiane — the snake inside the mountain that makes the gold — being male. There are also a few other zingers in the piece that could have been fact checked: the tailing from the mine eventually make their way into the Gulf of Papua, not the Coral Sea as the article claims.
But these are small quibbles and the article at least shows great restraint given the lefty inclinations of CorpWatch. And indeed, since 2001, it has gotten harder and harder to pain the mine as a success story (as I did in my dissertation) in which mine and Ipili needs and demands were more or less in equilibrium. Mounting social pressure, shooting of illegal miners, and so forth have all taken their toll on life in the valley — or at least so it seems to me from this distance. Also I must say that I am sort of partial to this report because its _tene_ are my Waiwa brothers Nelson Akiko and William Gaupe and you _know_ I still represent for Waiwa.
So while I think that “Kelly Patterson’s article”:http://alex.golub.name/log/2006/06/04/article-on-the-ipili-in-the-ottowa-citizen/ does a better job of sounding out the complexities of the mine’s entanglement with Porgera, I like CorpWatch’s report just because it is ethnographically richer — there are pictures of Nelson, transcriptions of interviews, etc. Check it out.
Out of the blue the other day Savage minds got “a comment from Howard (Eilberg-)Schwartz”:http://savageminds.org/2006/04/28/savage-jews/#comment-53589. I think of him as the Rabbi Who Reads Levi-Strauss, but apparently since then he has become a business executive and now lectures on the intersection of spirituality and corporate social responsibility. He has a “new website”:http://www.freedomandcapitalism.com/ with information about him and his books, an an especially valuable offer to sell you a PDF of his book _The Savage In Judaism_ for US$10. Of course since he’s now rich and doesn’t need the money I think he should just make it available open access under a Creative Commons license, but that’s just me. At any rate if you’ve tried to piece together who this guy is based on his somewhat fragmentary Google-trail now there’s a one-stop Schwartz stop for your convenience.
In case you’ve been wondering about all the words that I’ve been writing that haven’t appeared here, you can find some in my new column at IHE — it’s called “Old Boy Networked”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/02/19/golub.
“Yup, They’re Gay”:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582336,00.html
I was in the shower this morning thinking about Dru Gladney’s writings on ethnic minorities in China and specifically why I hadn’t ever read any of them despite the fact (according to everyone I talk to) that I should have. There are many reasons I haven’t read Gladney’s work (other than the excellent edited volume ‘making majorities’) and it was then that a thought struck me — an idea that I’d chewed around the edges of but had never really been able to put explicitly. In China, non-Han ethnic groups are minorities in the classical sense — they are the ‘other’ against whom Han imagine themselves as the unmarked category. Ethnic identity in China is (I’m guessing, since I’ve never read anything about it) about the familiar process of boundary maintenance — delimiting majority ethnic identity vis-a-vis making other Others.
But not in Papua New Guinea. Landowners in Papua New Guinea — who we call ‘indigenous people’ even though this isn’t quite the right term — play a totally different role in Papua New. In Papua New Guinea, grass roots people are _central_ to national identity. Papua New Guineans — and especially the ones in Moresby — see rural Papua New Guineans as central to their identity, the true repository and custodian of what it means to be Papua New Guinean. This is the reason that people who were born in Moresby, were raised in New Ireland, and went to college in Queensland describe themselves as ‘from Laiagam’ — because that is where one of their parents were from and all Papua New Guineans are supposed to be ‘from a village’.
I know that this is an obvious thing to say to people who think about Papua New Guinea, but framing the issue in this way did help me get some intellectual work done — by being central rather than peripheral to national identity, rural Papua New Guineans figure quite differently in their national imagination than most other ‘indigenous people’. And the incredibly touchiness that urban Papua New Guineans have about landowners — the inability to forgive opportunism, the insistence that they must all love to farm and have no aspirations for development, they must all preserve kastom and tok ples — this can also be attributed to a sensitivity that is the result of the high moral and sentimental stakes which rural Papua New Guineans have to bear in the name of their fellow countrymen.
3 Quarks Daily has a reasonably long piece on Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/01/a_case_of_the_m_2.html — a book that I am teaching right now in class. Note to self note to self note to self.
IHE has a short piece today on “Middlebury’s banning students from using Wikipedia”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki. The article is interesting, but what is especially valuable to me (and the paper on Wikipedia that I wrote) are the comments it generated, which provide a nice slice of quotable academic opinions about Wikipedia. As someone who has contributed a lot to Wikipedia I have a soft spot for it, but at the same time I have the sort of knowledge of its limits that can only come from, well, contributing to it. And of course its very embarrassing when students hand in papers to me that have been plagiarized from my own Wikipedia articles. I’ve been following the development of Citizendium (the other alternative)pretty closely now for some time, but as far as I can tell its not quite ready for prime time (or world-readable either).
This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar, and in our session last week we were talking a bit about what it means to be American and what a distinctively ‘American’ take on things is. I’ve never felt particularly ‘American’ in the ‘Anglo-protestant’ sense and my California childhood didn’t prepare me very well for my first experience of WASPism when I moved to Chicago. And of course teaching in Hawai’i where many of your students (or their parents) come from countries in the Asia-Pacific, even simple things like the rules of baseball can’t really be taken for granted when you hold seminars. I’m not complaining — this is a good thing. But it did lead to some fat-chewing as we attempted to figure out exactly what American culture was about.
That evening after the seminar I came home and came across the following sentence — purely by chance — on the Internet: “”His Girl Friday”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032599/ [is] America’s _Rules of the Game_ — if our civilization vanished tomorrow, nearly all of its best and most distinctive aspects could be reconstructed from the slangy, sassy grace of this film’s dialogue.”
And I realized that yes, this was completely and totally true.
The quote comes from Benjamin Schwartz’s recent “round-up of Cary Grant biographies”:http://www.powells.com/review/2007_01_23. It is an absolutely lovely little little piece of criticism, mostly because of its judicious clipping of good lines about Cary Grant from other pieces about him (“Grant possessed a technical command…so complete it is barely noticeable”) as well as a few of his own (“Grant found a novel way to treat women in film: he clearly related to his heroine as a sexually attractive woman — and also as a witty, intelligent, and idiosyncratic one. Often he conveyed this by adopting the seemingly obvious but previously overlooked strategy of simply listening to her”)
Grant, of course, is the ultimate mid-Atlantic actor. But he is also impossible to overlook (“who else is James Bond,” as someone once put it, “but Cary Grant with a gun?”). Reading Schwartz’s piece helped me realize that as some one whose identity was forged — in both senses of the word — he is in some sense the ultimate American, or at least his screwball comedies like His Girl Friday do epitomize the “slangy, sassy grace” that is so typical of one sector of our country’s soul.
Woah — Interoil has “made it to the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/business/yourmoney/21oil.html?_r=1&ref=yourmoney&oref=slogin. Any guess how long it takes the piece to mention cannibalism?
Think about it fer a sec…
….
Yup — the first sentence of the piece, 17 words in.
Here is a recent, teachable article. Evolutionary psychology as a discipline is bad enough, but reportage of ev psych reports tend to make matters even worse. The head line is “For two thousand years men have written about ladies with small waists”:http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8516458. “This is not proof,” the article cautions — but don’t worry, it does tend to suggest that all of your preconceptions of gender relations are true. What a relief!
The latest installment of my monthly column is up over at Inside Higher Ed — this time its a musing on answering the question “what do you study?”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/01/12/golub. Enjoy!
This sounds promising: gracenote is “revamping the way it handles classical music metadata”:http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/press/article.html/date=2007010802 — and it has the support of a lot of labels and musicians. If you listen to classical music digitally, you know what a relief this (hopefully) will be.
“Philip Smith”:http://www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/pages/smith/
…
Oh sorry… that should be a Dukheimian _studying_ the panopticon!
IHE is running a cartoon that I will certainly use the next time I assign an essay topic to my students:
“While writing your essays, I encourage you to think for yourselves while you express what I’d most agree with”:http://insidehighered.com/var/ihe/storage/images/media/news_images/cartoons/when_writing_essays/1466096-1-eng-US/when_writing_essays.png.
It’s a great object lesson of a message I _don’t_ want my students to get and which they often do — and in doing so, I’m afraid they demonstrate that they know more about me than I do!
Islands Business has a nice wrap-up of “W. Clinton’s trip to PNG”:http://www.islandsbusiness.com/islands_business/index_dynamic/containerNameToReplace=MiddleMiddle/focusModuleID=17203/overideSkinName=issueArticle-full.tpl including his receipt of the nation’s highest honor — the PNG equivalent of being knighted. Typically (and depressingly) some journalists recorded this as Clinton “being made a tribal chief”. Clinton was much more diplomatic about the country’s place in Anglo-protestant mythology as ‘the last unknown’ saying only that it had “a special place in my imagination”.
…right after I post this link:
“Selected Essays by Nicholas Wyatt on Royal Ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0754653307&id=BP-WezDMkDQC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&ots=ye68UnkZQf&dq=myths+of+power+ugaritic&sig=gJxPq97iGCwnbXKlAf4fiB-3KXA#PPP1,M1
I’d love to read this book, but when I see the word “Ashgate” on the spine of a book I know that means “we printed three of them and each one costs US$300″. I could just go back to the original fora where these essays were published, but they’re obscure and not available online. This kind of specialized literature is exactly the sort of thing where an open access approach would work. Ah well…
For the truly geeky — now you can download “Thomas Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides _History of the Peloponessian War_ for free”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Intros/Thucydides.php.
Go nuts, and happy new year!
More on unpacking this image when I have time, but I thought I’d dock it here:
“Science: It works, bitches”:http://xkcd.com/c54.html
A student of mine pointed me to this link on “corporate slogans and cross-cultural misunderstanding”:http://moronland.net/moronia/moron/1064/. It’s a fun little piece that will be great to teach with in the future.
Here is a “good article on the increasing role of the PRC in the Pacific”:http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/174736.html. The article focuses on Papua New Guinea, and is right on target — there have always been Chinese expats in PNG, and the Pacific has always been a place where Taiwan and the PRC have fought for diplomatic recognition. But with a mainland firm operating the Ramu nickel mine and other expansion in the area, Chinese interest in the Pacific is taking a notably different form.
Today in class we are watching some Borat clips to talk about some basic issues in the politics of representation. Here they are:
“Borat Trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/borat/trailer/
“Ad for Borat Soundtrack”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXGMfNRwc1g
“StopBorat.com”:http://stopborat.com/ — a fake anti-Borat website. Will the recursion ever end?!?!?
“Kazakhstan embassy on Borat (NPR)”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6276973
A new piece of mine, “Christianity — you’re soaking in it!”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/11/02/golub is now up at Inside Higher Ed. Let he who has ears hear.
And here’s another book I’d like to get to in my Copious Free Time: “Gold Rush Capitalists”:http://www.amazon.com/Gold-Rush-Capitalists-Growth-Sacramento/dp/0826328229/sr=8-1/qid=1162428785/ref=sr_1_1/002-0199581-3412860?ie=UTF8&s=books — not only is it about Sacramento, there are also cheap used copies.
I often use Dawkin’s outrage with religion as an example to my anthro students that science, too, is a culture. Rather than use interviews with him now, there’s a “whole new book”:http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004/sr=8-1/qid=1162357679/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books that I will have to look over in my Copious Free Time.
Here’s something I’ll try to read in class tomorrow if I can ever get around to it — Nancy Sullivan on “the Trobriand art of persuasion”:http://www.nancysullivan.org/article-thetrobriandsartofpersuasion.htm. Yes, people other than “professional baseball players:”http://www.dushkin.com/olc/genarticle.mhtml?article=27128 believe in magic…
One of the ironies of living in Hawaii after living in highlands Papua New Guinea is that all the tropical flora and fauna doesn’t look ‘exotic’ the way it does to mainlanders who first arrive here. It looks slightly… _off_. Many varieties of pandanus grow here in Honolulu, for instance, but none of them resemble the stuff that I saw in Porgera (where Pandanus is totally central to the culture of the area). I keep having conversations about this with people here who have never seen ‘my’ version of pandanus. So this blog entry is a mental note and bookmark to this great picture of “Marita”:http://www.pngbd.com/photos/watermark.php?file=505/3412Madang_Market_Marita_Red_Pandanus_Madang.jpg, which is both delicious and very hard to find pictures of, even on the Internet. Yes folks: it really _doesn’t_ look anything like coastal pandanus fruits or… well… anything else, really.
Not much of a post, but I thought I’d break radio silence on this blog to post a link to this “anthropological analysis of companion parrots”:http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa11.4/anderson.shtml as part of my longstanding (and long dormant!) interest in human-animal interactions which I found via “Tracks”:http://timothyjpmason.com/wordpress/. In other news I’m working my way — slowly — through Rebecca Cassidy’s “Sport of Kings”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN052100487X&id=A-QYXw9Wl9YC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=sport+of+kings&sig=HqaMihlGyD04O7ioDGQkBHnQDUQ which is not, I think, quite as interesting to an American audience as it is an English one. Nevertheless it does grow on you, and the bit on fashion amongst established families is quite good.
Ok, back to work.
On 16 September Papua New Guinea celebrated it’s (if I can count) 32nd anniversary of independence. Hurray congratulations!
Those of us who grew up in the tail-end of the Cold War know Greg Costikyan as the Leonardo da Vinci of serious gamer geekdom. He didn’t just _write_ games, he wrote _great_ games like Paranoia. And the games he wrote were smart, funny, and insightful. Since then he’s gone on to produce popular fiction which is equally incisive — his novel “First Contract”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812545494/sr=8-1/qid=1156573037/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8 is an absolute must for any academic thinking seriously about globalization or culture contact or neoliberal governmentality. Yes really. His knowlede of the history of table top gaming is also truly staggering, and for the past couple of years his blogging and other writing on the gaming industry has been excellent.
So his latest effort “Manifesto Games”:http://www.manifestogames.com/ is something I feel biologically compelled to write about. It doesn’t take long surfing around the site to figure out exactly what is going on — an indie games program wrapped around a content delivery system wrapped around a bunch of well-designed but not Oblivion-beautiful games. Anybody who remembers the Good Old Days of Oregon Trail will find themselves at home on the sight — they even have “Taipan”:http://www.manifestogames.com/node/1058!
So… go buy something from them now!
Like all normal people I waste time in the office googling for pictures of Jean-Claude Van Damme. I found “this one”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1994kt.html. I am not sure exactly what is happening here, except that if you are on that page you are only one click away from “this one”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1995kt.html and “this one”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1996kt.html. So the message is: if you want to melt your brain with pictures of random celebrities dressed up in Medieval Times garb, this is the place to do it.
Update: “oh”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1985kt.html “yes”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1987kt.html
Update update: “I admit”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/2004kt.htm
I recently listened to “this interview”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/the_interview.shtml on the BBC with Chinese ambassador Sha Xu Kang. If you were wondering what the Chinese diplomatic equivalent of the “Terry Gross/Gene Simmons”:http://erim.net/archives/gene-simmons-and-terry-gross-interview interview was, this is it. The first 19 minutes go by just fine, until the interviewer starts asking about Taiwan and it starts to ramp up…
I recently read — in, like, a day — _I Am Alive And You Are Dead_ by Emmanuel Carrere. It’s a biography (sort of) of Philip K Dick. I’ve always loved read PDK and I knew that they were all more or less true. That is to say, that he struggled with mental illness, died believing God was beaming information into his head, that he transcribed his own exegisis of the bible/science fiction novel that would eventually be articulated through him and so forth. But I had no idea just how bizarre Dick’s life was, which is to say, crazy beyond belief. He is the archetypical person who is too smart to go crazy but does so anyway — definitely a type I’ve encountered more than once in my life.
Carrere’s prose is racy and streamlined and clearly very French, although it never suffers from appearing to have been thought in one language and then written in another. Apparently there is now an extensive literature on PDK, none of which I’ve read. So while I have no idea how Carrere compares to the others, I must say that as far as I am concerned if you are looking for just one book to read on PDK this is it. It is a biography, but it is written as a novel in the third person but with long passages explaining the various mental worlds and dilemmas that PDK was living through. However it is also a guide to the content of his most important novels. This treatment of the subject, ignoring as it does the line between documented events, what the author merely imagines his subject to have felt, and the description of the actions in various novels, is quite fast and loose with the facts. This would only be a problem, of course, if your subject was anyone but PDK, who really didn’t see any difference between all of these worlds.
Given the ultimate tragedy of PDK’s life, the book is more than a little depressing. But the audacity with which PDK lives means that it is also very funny. And most importantly, it’s a fantastic read about a fantastic author. I highly reccomend it.
By Internet standards I have been around for quite a while, and while not a dinosaur on the scale of, you know, _David Weinberger_ or something ( :) )I’ve witnessed the rise and fall of a good many trends in the blogosphere and elsewhere. So while I don’t have a second brain located in my spike-studded tail, I do have a scar or two from being scraped by Internet faddism as its brushed past me and dug into my arm. I’m also in many ways a very traditional scholar who has a passion for paper. So while I am interested in the possibilities of cutting-edge technology I am not a bleeding-edge person or an unreserved enthusiast for change. So I think “Scott Palmer”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/15/palmer has more or less Got It when he writes:
Similarly, the emphasis that contributors to if:book seem to place on the “transparency†of scholarship and “immediacy†of publication made possible by digital delivery misses a very important point. There is much value to be found in not releasing one’s ideas to peers and public while those ideas are still half-baked. In many respects, the instantaneous delivery of “new media†writing is at odds with the solitude, meditation, and patience that are the hallmarks of traditional scholarship. Perhaps this is less true in if:book’s favored field (media studies), but it is manifestly not so for such disciplines as history, philosophy, and the like. Nor should it be. One can build a convincing case that, in the current age of instant analysis, self-absorbed “experts,†and ubiquitous 24/7 live blog feeds, the last thing that the academy needs is to embrace transparency and immediacy.
It reminds me of something Don Knuth once “said about email”:http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.
Roberto Rodriguez advocates the way that digital technology allows us to “create at the speed of thought”:http://agile2006.stikipad.com/public/show/MakingMoviesAndSoftwareAtTheSpeedOfThought but of course the question someone with a background in theater rather than movies asks is: what’s wrong with rehearsal again?
All of which to say: digital genres provide increased velocity of information. This creates a continuum of speeds from top to bottom to work from. Since we’ve never had the ability to manipulate information at speed before we find it productive to do so and find lots of ways of doing so that are productive. But that doesn’t mean faster or more networked is automatically better. What is valuable is having the continuum to cherry-pluck from. I love to blog, but there is also work that I keep very close to my chest until it is done. The irony of a universally-readable ‘world of first drafts’ (as David calls the blogosphere) existing side by side with a smaller much higher quality and much more inaccessible world of revised material that, like Debian, is released ‘when its ready’ is hard to miss. But hey that’s life.
My point is just that there is a middle ground between enthusiasts of ‘networked books’ and people who find them anethma. Some of us occupy that middle ground, and we are fairly confident everyone will end up there as well — or at least find the configuration of speeds and modes they find most sympatico. But please recognize that not everyone who is into creative commons licenses also wants to eliminate the bottom of things and force everyone to live at the top.
In the name of becoming _the_ central blog for all things having to do with Shaloha, I hereby link to “Holy Tongue”:http://www.betham.org/sermons/marder030523.html a sermon about reform Judaism that starts in Kawaiaha’o.
I spent the weekend moving and so I almost missed this: “Porgera landowners want state of emergency”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20060803/news06.htm. Nixon Mangape calls me brother (my adopted mother and his mother were sisters) and so it’s always a pleasure to see him in the press. Enga province, where Porgera is located, has a long history of states of emergency and suspensions of provincial government that is the result of various factions within the province jostling for supremacy. It is only recently that Southern Highlands has managed to pull ahead on the most-suspended, most-emergencied province list. Despite what one might think of Peter Ipatas, the governor of Enga, I think it is a sign of his success as a leader that he was able to so eclipse other contenders for power in the province that he could be convicted of corruption charges _without_ people burning down the Provincial Government Offices, as has happened in the pat. Twice.
*A great guide to superb “oblivion”:http://helpdesk.gamehelper.com/kb/683.htm “mods”:http://helpdesk.gamehelper.com/kb/682.htm.
*”Zazzle”:http://www.zazzle.com/ — because, yes, someone googling for the meaining of the word “pudicity” _will_ click on a google add for “put this definition on a shirt!” at freedictionary.com. I want a t shirt with just a big picture of Nirnroot and nothing else.
*Levi-Strauss on Mauss’s _Les techniques du corps_: “The Publication of _International Archives of Body Techniques_… would also be a project eminently well fitted for coutneracting racial prejudices, since it would contradict the racialist conceptions which try to make out that man is a product of his body, by demosntrating that it is the other way around: man has, at all times and in all palces, been able to turn his body into a product of his techniques and his representations.” (Introduction to Mauss, pp. 8-9).
I’ve mentioned “Liberty Fund”:http://libertyfund.org/ in the past as a good source of classic social thought. When I visited their site recently again today I was flabberghasted to see that they now also have the “Online Library of Liberty”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/index.php featuring an absolutely sick collection of open access full text. This includes not only important but difficult find pieces like “Millar’s”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Author.php?recordID=0660 The Origin and Distinction of Ranks but also works that are not from their print catalog — public domain pieces which they have reproduced as HTML. So now not only can you read “Origin and Distinction of Ranks”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Author.php?recordID=0660 (warning: 2 meg PDF) but also the HTML of “Letters of Sidney, on Inequality of Property. To which is added, a Treatise of the Effects of War on Commercial Prosperity”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Book.php?recordID=1318. Their catalog is very deep and includes many important thinkers and is a superb resource for teaching. Thanks Liberty Fund!
“Positive.Negative”:http://www.positivenegative.net.au/ is a an AusAid-sponsored touring photo exhibit which uses pictures of everyday life in order to educate people about the dangers of HIV/AIDS in countries of strategic importance to the Australian Government. It includes some wonderful pictures by “Lorrie Graham”:http://www.lorriegraham.com/ of people in “Papua New Guinea”:http://www.positivenegative.net.au/photos/photos_graham.asp, where HIV/AIDS is indeed an enormous problem (she has an “extended selection”:http://www.lorriegraham.com/collections/aid/aid_thumbs_1.htm of these photos on her personal site). Take a look at the pictures and learn about the issue as well — unfortunately this is a problem that is not going to go away by itself.
“Eriberto ‘Fuji’ Lozada”:http://www.davidson.edu/personal/erlozada/ looks like someone doing interesting work in China. But then again thinking about working in China is terrifying since there is no end to the people and writings out there.
I liked the movie more than Henry but ultimately I agree with him on why “the world doesn’t need superman”:http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/07/why_the_world_doesnt_need_supe.html#more.
“Trulies.”:http://www.superdickery.com/dick/9.html
“It is a widely spread Oceanic tale of the origin of death… that human finitude is the result of a choice or conflict between a stone and a banana. Bananas are large, perennial herbs which put forth tall, vigorous shotos which die after producing fruit. The choice, the conflict in these tales is between progeny followed by death (the banana) and eternal but sterile life (the stone). The banana always wins.” – J.Z. Smith, _Map Is Not Territory_ pp. 303-304.
Most histories of Jews in Hawaii note that the first Jew in Hawaii was a cook in the employment of Kamehameha observed by Ebenezer Townsend. I am sure that many have had the same feeling that I have had about this passage: huh? So I decided to track the reference down.
The origin of this story is “Extracts from the diary of Ebenezer Townsend, Jr., supercargo of the sealing ship _Neptune_ on her voyage to the south Pacific and Canton”, number four of Hawaiian Historical Society reprint series, arranged and indexed by Bruce Cartwright and printed in a limited edition of 500. The brief monograph itself was originally published as one of the papers of the New Haven Historical Society (volume 6, in fact) in 1888. All of the details recounted below can be found in that volume.
Ebenezer Townsend was one of New Haven’s most prominent shipping magnates in the late eightenth century, and the Neptune’s expedition to ‘the south Pacific and Canton’ was one of the many expeditions that underwrote. It was a sealing expedition — the ship left the United States with no cargo and traveled around Cape Horn and into the Pacific, where it harvested seals (80,000!). The skins were dressed and the ship proceeded to China, where they were sold. The money was reinvested in Chinese products, the ship sailed home, and the owner sold them to Yankees hungry for Chinese luxury items. While Townsend himself stayed in New Haven, his son Ebenezer Townsend Jr. served aboard the ship as ’supercargo’ — an accountant who kept track of the books and protected his father’s interests. Townsend’s journal provides a valuable account of Hawaii between Cook’s first visit to the islands (1778) and the arrival of missionaries (1820), at which point written records of Hawaii’s history grow in number. George Vancouver’s account of his visits to Hawai’i in the early 1790s come from the same period as Townsend’s diary.
The Neptune arrived in Hawaii on August 12th, 1798 and stayed until August 31st. On August 20th, 1798 the Neptune was visited by Kamehameha and several members of his family, who visited the ship in order to take in what was at that time the still-novel event of having a ship visit the islands. In addition to his family members Townsend notes that “He [Kamehameha] also brought a Jew cook with him, and if he remains here I think it will be difficult to trace his descendants, for he is nearly as dark as they are” (p. 8). The only other mention of ‘the Jew cook’ comes at the end of Townsend’s diary, where he notes that “The king (Kamehameha (k)), when he made his visit to us, brought his own fare, although he brought a Jew cook () with him: what he brought, however, was such as could not be cooked in their way on board; he brought dogs and pigs readily cooked.” (p. 27).
It is not clear who exactly this ‘Jew cook’ is or indeed if he is anyone at all. Townsend seems to recognize that he is more lightly-complexted than Hawaiians, although he then notes that he is almost as dark (from tanning, presumably) than they. The second mention of the cook is ambiguous — it suggests either that there was no reason to bring a cook since the Hawaiian method of cooking pigs and dogs is impossible in a ship (because it requires an earth oven) or that there was no point in bringing a Jewish cook on board because he would not be permitted by the laws of kashrut to prepare dogs or pigs.
As far as I can tell, Townsend was not the most acute observer of Hawaii — there are other details which he records (such as the location and timing of the ‘Olowalu massacre’) which do not agree with other observers. Clearly he saw — or thought he saw — someone ethnically diffrent from other Hawaiians in Kamehameha’s entourage. But his sense of ethnicity is quite removed from ours — like many other Europeans of that time he refered to Hawaiians as ‘Indians’ — and how he got ‘Jew’ out his experience is a matter of speculation. Some next steps in researching the problem would be to examine his full diary and check for other references for Jews, or to go back closely over earlier sources and check for Goldbergs or Rosensteins who went awol in Hawaii.
“Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust”:http://www.tautai.org/home.php has a cool website (via Dan Taulapapa McMullin (check out his poem “The Bat”:http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/whetu_moana/mcmullin.asp)).
Buffalo Gold now has a “Mt. Kare”:http://www.buffalogold.ca/s/MtKareProject.asp page. More on their trials and tribulations “here”:http://news.goldseek.com/StewartArmstrong/1151607270.php
“Huzzah!”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/86518141@N00/173384502/
If you were a sociologist interested in the recent heavies in theory and wanted a quick crib sheet, you might look “here”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/sore/53/s1. Honestly the most interesting thing about this issue (after the article on DMS) is _who_ they choose to write about. Spivak has those kinda legs in sociology? Who knew.
UPDATE: Sorry, the full citation is Roland Munro. 2005. Partial Organization: Marilyn Strathern and the Elicitation of Relations. The Sociological Review 53(s1): 245-266.
Well its finally happened — Placer’s old Porgera information page is now over on the “Barrick website”:http://www.barrick.com/Default.aspx?SectionID=AE16ED96-78D3-4451-AB11-281B502746FB&LanguageID=1&ProjectId=e84dc542-4437-4761-af82-35d7a603d457. For almost thirty years ‘Placer’ was synonymous with Porgera. No longer. It’s the end of an era. Even worse, Barrick has none of the informative PDFs and fact sheets that Porgera used to have. Phooey.
The Wikipedia entry on “incipit”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incipit is a scrumptiously brief comparative piece. I particularly like the final point about computer files.
I’ve published a new column on Inside Higher Ed which you can read “here”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/20/golub. It’s part of a double feature with Shari Wilson — her column is “here”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/20/wilson. So far the response to Shari’s piece has been very positive while I’ve been lambasted by an anonymous commenter. Oh how the worm turns.
On the other hand, if I get enough negative comments then I will have enough material to write a blog entry here — and if I get even more then I could do an entire column on IHE about it!
To follow up the quote on Burke here is a nice on from Wayne Booth’s _The Company We Keep_:
“In principle, then, my subject must be all narratives… Even the life we think of as primary experience — that is, events like birth , copulation, death, plowing and planting, getting and spending — is rarely experienced withotu some sort of mediation in narrative; one of the chief arguments for an ethical critciism of narrative is that narratives make and remake what in realist views are considered more primary experiences — and thus make and remake ourselves.
We all live a great proportion of our lives in a surrender to stories about our lives, adn about other possible lives; we live more or less _in_ stories, depending on how strongly we resist surrendering to what is ‘only’ imagined. Even those few tough-minded ones among us who claiim to reject all ‘unreality’; even those who read no novels, watch no soap operas, and share no jokes; even those (if there are any) who echo Mr. Gradgrind and have truck only with ‘the facts’; even the statisticians and accountants must _in fact_ conduct their daily business largely in stories: the reports they receive from and give to superiors and subordinates; the accounts they deliver to tax lawyers; the anecdotes and parables they hear told by a histrionic president as he sells his panaceas; the metaphors, living or moribund, implied in the bignettes that glood the office correspondence and publicity releases. Many of us indeed approach an opposite extreme, living so much of our lives in stories that we must wonder what to call primary, the plowing and planting or the stories about plowing and planting. And when we go too far along that line, or when we embrace certain kinds of destructive ‘realities,’ we are rightly declared deranged.
Our subejct then is the ethical value of the stories we tell each other as ‘imitations of life,’ whether or not they in fact claim to depict actual events. The borderlines between such stories and the rest of life is necessarily vague. When mothers tell fairy stories, do their children experience fictions or ‘life’? When the wife shouts ‘I hate you!’ and throws the coffee cup, bother her statment and her action fall otuside her domain. But if she goes on to say, ‘because you promised me to be faithful and then, after ten years, I learn that you have been having an affair with my best friend,’ she has told a story (true or false) and opened the door to the ethical critic of narrative.”
There’s a blog title that will confuse all but the truly initiated. Post Courier article here covers “the decision”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20060614/business.htm.
I recently ordered a copy of They Say/I Say, Gerry Graff’s new book, to use in teaching writing. I like it and love the way it is full of great quotations and examples of writing. In particular it led me to track down this quote from Kenneth Burke, which is a great way to describe to students how academic writing works. It also helps remind us that just because Bakhtin is all about heteroglossalia, not all heteroglossia is about Bakhtin:
“In equating ‘dramatic’ with ‘dialectic,’ we automatically have also our perspectice for the analysis of history, which is a ‘dramatic’ process, involving dialectic oppositions. And if we keep this always in mind, we are reminded that every document bequeathed us by history must be treated as a _strategy for encompassing a situation_. This, when considering some document like the American Constitution, we shall be automatically warned not to consider it in isolation, but as the _answer_ or _rejoinder_ to assertions current in the situation in which it arose. We must take this into account when confronting now the problem of abiding by its ‘principles’ in a situation in that puts forth totally different questions than those prevailing at the time when the document was formed. We should thus claim as our allies, in embodying the ‘dramatic perspective,’ those modern critics who point out that our Constitution is to be considered as a rejoinder to the theories and practices of mercantilist paternalism current at the time of its establishment.
Where doe the drama get its materials? From the ‘unending conversation’ that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, other have long prededed you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one preent is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
-Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 109-110
Because, you know, I’m keeping track.
Jacob Adler: “Elias Abraham Rosenberg, King Kalakaua’s Soothsayer”:http://www.hawaiianhistory.org/pubs/hjhlist.html. Article from the Hawaiian Journal of History 4 1970.
“An Early History of Jews in Hawaii”:http://www.konabethshalom.org/ourhistoryxx.htm
MIT is have a “big sale”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=11&order=d9. Often times when presses have sales their prices don’t drop much beyond those of Amazon’s retail price of the price of as-new used copies in the Internet. Just eyeballing the titles on sale at MIT though, there are some real finds for people who are into MIT’s blend of hard science and cultural studies.
The Ottowa Citizen has published a “lengthy article on the Ipili and Placer”:http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=26bacccd-fa28-4f96-b067-a436b6a6d881 by Kelly Patterson. Patterson spent a LOT of time emailing me about the article and I’m quoted extensively in it. She’s also interviewed my colleagues Jerry Jacka and Glenn Banks. It is a little strange seeing one’s words reproduced on the page, but I guess that turn about is fair play and as an anthropologist I’m the last person who should complain about how strange it is being reported upon! The article is quite long and does an excellent job of summing up what has become an incredibly complex and emotional topic, for which Patterson deserves credit. I am sure that it will not please everyone, and that several of the groups party to Porgeran politics will feel that they have not been sympathetically rendered, and that others got off too light. But this is just the way things go in the valley.
I’d recommend the article to friends and family interested in learning a little bit more about some of the issues involved in my fieldsite.
Via a few links via Leuschke, the superb poem “The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered”:http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v10/0368.html
“Lightsaber Without A Key”:http://alex.golub.name/log/the-lightsaber-without-a-key/ installment “number seven”:http://alex.golub.name/log/the-lightsaber-without-a-key#VII is now up.
I’ve updated the look of my website. This is my way of giving up on keeping web design one of my main skills and relegating it to something I used to do in my glory days. The theme looks fantastic because it’s Ben Eastaugh and Chris Johnson’s superb “Tarski”:http://ionfish.co.uk/tarski/ theme. I may try to tweak it a little but it looks great the way it is now — or it will when I get all the divs to behave.
This is _very_ old news but I thought I would post it anyway: Anne Kajir has won the Goldman environmental prize. Anne is a lawyer in PNG who has worked to expose and publicize corruption in the logging industry. Given how incredibly corrupt the logging industry in PNG is, it isn’t too hard to expose them, but what is hard is to get something _done_ about what they are doing to the country. It’s here that Anne has excelled. I hope the Goldman prize will make her and her work even more visible.
The best thing about the prize is that the award page as “an awesome movie about Anne and her work on logging”:http://www.goldmanprize.org/node/440 which is very well produced, quite short, and perfect for showing in the classroom when paired with an article, or just to start discussion. I encourage you all to check it out.
As it turned out posting “Lightsaber Without A Key” on someone else’s server didn’t work out too well and alwaysblack and I decided it would be best if I ran the remainder of the story here on alex.golub.name. Nothing traumatic, just quicker updates this way. There is now a “Lightsaber Without A Key”:http://alex.golub.name/log/the-lightsaber-without-a-key/ page that has the entire story from beginning to end, and I’ve just added “the sixth installment”:http://alex.golub.name/log/the-lightsaber-without-a-key#VI — hopefully if I get back to posting every 10 days or so then I should have it done by early July!
Another of my IHE op-eds has appeared — this one is entitled “Passion for Paper”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/05/09/golub.
UMass has an awesome “page of WEB De Bois”:http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/collections/galleries/dubois18.htm pictures which include him meeting famous people like MAO. That’s right: “WEB De Bois and Mao”:http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/collections/galleries/dubois/MS0312-0741.jpg. Talk about two great tastes that taste great together. I want to make an energy drink which has this picture on every can.
Note to self: next time I teach about plolygyny in class, be sure to use “Michelle Cottle’s”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060501&s=cottle050306 recent piece in TNR to spur discussion.
The “National Library of Scotland”:http://www.nls.uk/ has a lovely site full of “scanned-in broadsides”:http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/index.html that you can browse through. They are redolent of period, and the best place on the web to find “all the lyrics to ‘where did you get that hat’”:http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15063/criteria/where%20did%20you%20get%20that%20hat.
The Solomon Islands have been in the news a lot lately. I’ve visited the country just briefly and my colleague Tara Kabutaulaka has “spoken his own piece”:http://www.eastwestcenter.org/events-en-detail.asp?news_ID=318 on what has happened recently. One source of my knowledge about what’s been going on has been from Terry Brown, the Anglican bishop of “Malaita”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaita (and contributor to the excellent full-text archive of Oceania stuff at “Project Canterbury”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auki, who has been emailing pretty regularly to describe what his experience of the trouble is from Malaita. With his permission I’m reproducing some emails from him regarding what happened in “Auki”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auki this April. Read on for more from Terry:
*17 April 2006*
Friends,
Just a note to keep your ear to the radio and other media, as with the announcement of Snyder Rini (backed by the former PM, Kemakeza) as new Prime Minister, the crowd around Parliament went crazy, breaking Parliament windows, barricading the Governor General and Members of Parliament in the building (I think they are still there), destroyed vehicles (including quite a few RAMSI vehicles, and possibly one RAMSI injury), and have looted stores in Honiara belonging to Tommy Chan, the Chinese eminence grise behind the party and coalition led by Rini and Kemakeza. I am writing from Auki, which is quiet, though there is much disappointment here too with the result of the PM election. The two old guard groups, led by Rini/Kemakeza and Sogavare respectively, backed by Chinese business interests, have banded together to prevent the new generation of cleaner politicians from emerging. And as RAMSI has been so identified with the Kemakeza government, they are now feeling the heat. It remains to be seen whether RAMSI and the police will get hold of public order in Honiara tonight, or whether RAMSI troops will have to be flown in from Australia. The crowds are demanding that the new PM resign immediately but he is refusing. Democracy has flaws in the Solomons! Bishop Terry Brown.
*18 April 2006*
Dear Friends,
Rioting is continuing in Honiara this morning, with Chinese businesses targeted, especially new developments. Pacific Casino is now under attack and marchers are headed for Parliament. All are demanding the resignation of the new Prime Minister. He refuses to resign. (If he continues to refuse, the Parliament building will probably be torched.) Overnight, Chinatown and various other Chinese stores in Point Cruz and around Honiara were torched. There are roadblocks all about, both RSIP/RAMSI and local people (e.g., Fishing Village). The Speaker of Parliament and Governor General have been on the radio pleading for calm but to no avail. I have heard a report that the number of RAMSI personnel injured is 20, and at least nine RAMSI vehicles have been destroyed. In some cases, police are doing nothing and letting the rioters go ahead, as they are beyond the power of the police. I have heard a report that 500 troops are on the way from Australia. We have had various phone calls from Honiara and the situation sounds grim and basically still out of control.
Decades of bitterness against the Chinese community for its wealth, its abusive behaviour towards Melanesian staff, its “buying” of successive national governments (including, most likely, this one), its apparent immunity from RAMSI investigation (I think the feeling is that if Tommy Chan had been a Malaitan, he’d been in prison by now), its involvement in highly lucrative resource extraction, the larges sums of money taken out of the country illegally, etc., etc., finally came to the fore, sparked by the result of yesterday’s Prime Ministerial election. The talk here is of “stage two” in the “ethnic tension” process, Solomon Islands vs. Chinese.
We also had our small riot last night in Auki, with a gang of youths shooting stones at a RAMSI vehicle, the fire truck (whose megaphone they were using) and a selected Chinese store whose owner is well known for being particularly abuse to local Melanesian staff. Local RSIP police calmed down the crowd. I tried to go down to help calm them down but was stopped by RAMSI. (We have had, apparently, yet another change of RAMSI personnel, and I do not know this lot. Their constant changes of personnel mean that no empathy or friendship develops with local people.) But we will be affected by Honiara events as many of the Chinese shops here are branches of (now destroyed) shops in Honiara’s Chinatown. (The local excuse here was that the “waku- [Chinese] supported candidate” won the PM election.)
Today, all the Chinese shops in Auki are shut tight, as they are deeply affected by the situation in Honiara. We will work to see that rioting does not break out here again tonight.
I am afraid that in Auki, the general feeling of many on the streets is “they had it coming to them”, especially the egregious involvement of Chinese businessmen and money in election of the last and now new government of Kemakeza/Rini, whose “sweetheart” arrangements have greatly enriched some in the Chinese community and the politicians themselves. Of course, there is sadness about the violence and the effect on the country economically. The influx of more and more “new” Chinese, moving, for example, into transportation and taxi sector, has seen Melanesians feeling more and more on the economic bottom of their own country. I think years of being bossed by the Chinese “Missus” on her high chair at the cash register has finally got to people.
The Solomon Islands democratic process remains seriously flawed. While the election itself went well, corruption still remains in the election registration process, with registration officers removing new names from voting lists of those they know will not support their candidate (often the names of young people — a complaint I have been hearing in Malaita — many young people who signed up to vote for the first time, went to the polling station only to find that their names were not on the list). The registration officer in Auki simply did no work — the position is a sinecure for provincial employees. The selection process for Prime Minister is also flawed. Winning candidates with major campaign debts arrive in Honiara and are easily tempted by (Chinese) offers to pay off their campaign debts if they support such-and-such a candidate, even if they have denounced that candidate to get elected. (ABC news reports that over 50% of winning candidates in this election won with less than 30% of the vote in their constituencies, the result of extremely low election registration fees, whereby every “favourite son” candidate runs.) The parliamentary secret ballot in election of PM means no one is accountable for his (alas, only his) vote — the MP can make two or three sets of conflicting promises to two or three “parties” but as no one knows how he votes, he ends up a “winner” in any case. And so forth.
The events of yesterday and today will set back the Solomons economically again and I would think there might be a danger of food shortages in Honiara and even provincial towns. The economy is entirely dependent on the Chinese and with their absence, we are quite back to square one. But many in the Chinese community have abused their wealth and positions, and the result we see today.
Bishop Terry Brown
Diocese of Malaita,
Auki, Malaita Province
*19 April 2006*
Dear Friends,
As feared, we had a disturbance in Auki this evening but it has turned out well, in so far as such things can turn out. The police worked hard today, discouraging any plans to riot or loot this evening. However, obviously one group sequestered themselves drinking. I went for a walk around town about 7:30 p.m. and it was quiet, but suddenly there was the sound of stones hitting iron roofs and doors of shops and shouting and swearing. The group advanced from the market towards the police station, shooting at the lights on the verandahs of the stores.
The police (RSIP and RAMSI) organized themselves with riot gear (I suspect the first time deployed in Auki) and took on the group, backed by the general population of Auki, a few of the latter shooting stones on behalf of the police. Having seen what has happened in Honiara, and also having fairly good relations with our local Chinese, there was no interest in the general population in joining the group causing the disturbance. The police made nine arrests, although some escaped. At least one was an ex-MEF and another part of the group that burnt our Cathedral altar a few years ago. They all appeared to be drunk. The police thanked the crowd afterwards for their support and orderliness.
So, fortunately, Auki at least is behaving sensibly. The “rioters”, in this case, were shooting stones at anyone in their path and not distinguishing between Chinese and SI-owned stores or individuals. Goodnight from a quiet Auki. Bishop Terry Brown.
_(and a little later on in the day…)_
Dear Friends,
For a good local account of the burning down of the Pacific Casino hotel complex in Honiara, see http://www.solomonline.com/?q=node/98#comment. It’s a bit silly at times, but it is a good website to follow.
Number of arrested from last night’s disturbance in Auki has gone up to 16. This is a small place and people are easily recognized.
I would think that the public tide might turn in Honiara if the rioters begin attacking government buildings. One only hopes that RSIP/RAMSI have some plans to protect them. Most of the new Chinese hotels, casinos and other developments — all under threat if not destroyed — were built with bribes to successive SI governments, shady land deals, profits from illegal land transfers, etc.
Bishop Terry Brown
*21 April 2006*
Dear Friends,
I do not have much to report, but a few reflections and bits of news on the Solomons situation.
(1) A contingent of 10 RAMSI military (New Zealanders for sure, possibly others) have arrived in Auki. Yesterday they patrolled the streets of downtown Auki in full battle gear, fully armed. Obviously the full show of force is to make people think twice about causing any disturbance, especially at night. The last two nights have been quiet. In the end up to 16 were arrested in the Auki disturbance on Wednesday night. One Chinese shop (the one I mentioned in a previous update) was broken into and goods stolen. The owner and some of our other “new” Chinese fled to Honiara on Thursday morning. All the Chinese stores remain closed, although we are urging them to re-open as soon as possible. Of course, they are affected by events in Honiara. My impression is that the Honiara rioters distinguished between “old” and “new” Chinese buildings (QQQ in Chinatown was untouched), so our “old” Chinese stores in Auki may be in better shape than others. Long term though, Langa Langa vs. Chinese business rivalry in Auki will continue, and there will always be some in the former community who would like the latter simply to disappear. But Auki and Malaita are a big market, and there should be enough room for everyone. Banks finally re-opened and what little rice is still available has taken a big leap in price. Today’s Saturday morning market is going ahead full force as though nothing had happened (no RAMSI presence). The only difference is that the two or three large ships that usually come from Honiara Friday night have not arrived — obviously stopped by the police/RAMSI to prevent loot flowing out to the provinces (one load arrived yesterday) and gawkers and would-be rioters flowing into Honiara. As rural Malaitans have had their ears to the radio all last week (the FM station used its “call in” system to report the location of the mob and their arson and looting, while SIBC reported very little), many have come to Auki hoping to go to Honiara today to see the sights.
The Asian road workers on the Asian Development Bank-funded Kitano Malaita road-building project were also evacuated. It remains unclear to me why the ADB/Kitano has imported road workers from Cambodia and the Philippines to rebuild Malaita’s roads (some sort of internal Asian agenda, I suppose), as though we don’t have people in Malaita who can build roads. This is part of the feeling that everyone but Solomon Islanders are somehow making a profit out of our troubles (including, of course, all the NGOs, RAMSI advisors, consultants, volunteers, etc.).
(2) As far as Honiara events are concerned, the “spark” that sent the rioters into central Honiara from Parliament, the use of tear gas by the Australian RAMSI contingent against the crowd around Parliament who were becoming rowdy after the announcement of Snyder Rini’s election, needs to be investigated. The Speaker of Parliament and leaders of the parties were apparently preparing to address the crowd and calm them down (the exact same rowdiness developed after the announcement of Allan Kemakeza’s election as PM five years ago but was dissipated) when, apparently unannounced and without warning, the RAMSI tear gas hit. Sir Peter has complained about this on the Australian media and others have picked it up. It is cited as an example of Australian RAMSI’s over-reaction to events that look like they might turn violent. All through the riots, the use of tear gas only inflamed and increased the crowds.
(3) The rioting and looting crowds were made up of people from all provinces, including some women and children. While Robert Wale, the leader of the so-called “People Power” movement is from Malaita (Langa Langa), participation was from all provinces and it would be wrong to see the rioting as some sort of continuation of a Malaita Eagle Force plot. The rumors that Edmund Sae, for example, is in Honiara leading the troops are, I am fairly certain, untrue. (I am afraid he has acquired a Jon Frum-like persona in these kinds of events.) Robert Wale, it should be said, is not exactly a Corazon Aquino. He is a former member of the Honiara Town Council and his record there was not especially clean. I am sure that he must have lost out in some of the land deals that saw so much of Honiara’s prime sea front land sold to the Chinese by dubious means. I would think Wale would/should be arrested down the line, for incitement to riot. His media pronouncements are taking a high moral road but his record does not especially justify it.
(4) Honiara people have never liked the Australian RAMSI contingent. Most people distinguish between the Australian RAMSI (whom they don’t like) and the New Zealand and Pacific Islands RAMSI (whom they do like). The general feeling is that the RAMSI motto “Helpim fren” doesn’t hold much water when the Australian RAMSI are so sullen and hostile, won’t even say hello, speed up and down the streets without regard for the other traffic, won’t allow the use of RAMSI helicopters and planes for humanitarian purposes, and hang out at all the expensive Chinese restaurants (some of them now destroyed, such as the Fortune Restaurant in the Pacific Casino Hotel complex) and the Green Mango and won’t go near local eateries or the central market. (I heard a story yesterday that, indeed, RAMSI assisted financially Patrick Leong in the completion of the construction of the Pacific Casino Hotel, to house its personnel. It certainly has never attracted overseas tourists the way the hotels with casinos do in Vanuatu. The story needs to be checked out. There are also lots of stories about PCH being a centre of prostitution, which may well have involved RAMSI personnel. The “evacuation” of the Pacific Casino Hotel’s “guests” by boat may well have been simply the evacuation of RAMSI personnel from the hotel.) I have always wondered if there was any money laundrying involved in all the new Chinese developments.)
So, for many reasons, the alliance of the (1) Kemekeza/Rini (corrupt) government, (2) the extensive and expensive Chinese commercial developments in Honiara, from before “ethnic tension”, then interrupted, then resumed, while ordinary local Honiara people get poorer and poorer as the prices at the Chinese shops go up and up, and (3) RAMSI, friend of the Kemakeza/Rini government and the Chinese, (perceived as) hostile to Malaitans, unfriendly Australians, etc, etc. — all united together in the riots. I have heard that 15 RAMSI vehicles were destroyed, not to mention the Pacific Casinos’ entire rent-a-car fleet, 20 RAMSI injured (one sent back to Australia for serious jaw injuries from a stone). I am told that Reef Islanders can shoot a RAMSI helicopter with a stone. There were some failures of RAMSI intelligence — half of Solomon Islanders are saltwater people and it is a bit inconceivable that the sea side of the Pacific Casino Hotel was left unprotected.
The properties (commercial, offices, residences) of the Kemekeza/Rini government’s Chinese advisors and backers (for example, Tommy Chan, Robert Goh, Patrick Leong) were particularly targeted for destruction. The Honiara Hotel (Tommy Chan) has its own security and has survived, though there were rumours of an attack from over the hill behind the hotel. There were also rumours that the Mendana Hotel was on the hit list.
None of what I have written above is intended to condone or support the rioting. It is tragic, both for the individuals involved (on all sides) and for the country. For the Solomons claiming to be a “Christian country”, it is a travesty of the Easter message, as church leaders have pointed out in pastoral statements. But legitimate frustrations are there and people explode. Alas, we are now producing refugees, with 400 Chinese living at the Police Club at Rove under police/RAMSI security.
(5) The new Prime Minister’s media statements that the rioting had no political motivation and was simply criminal activity rather boggle the mind, although obviously those with non-political motives joined in for the free loot.
Despite the demands of Robert Wale and the “People Power” movement, I think the considered view of all members of Parliament, premiers, church leaders, diplomatic community, is that Parliament should meet and that any attempt to oust Rini as Prime Minister should be done constitutionally. In many respects, the announced cabinet contains some very good people, such as Fred Fono, the Deputy Prime Minister. Forcing a PM to resign by public protests, when he has been constitutionally elected (despite corruption), sets rather a bad precedent, such that every future election will face the same problem and the same hope by the losing party. If there were substantial bribes made (whether accepted or not) by the Rini camp and Tommy Chan, as Opposition leader Billy Hilly maintains, then the matter should be reported to the police; but whether the police and RAMSI have the wherewithal and will to follow up on and investigate these claims remains to be seen.
One issue in all of this is the extent to which Australia has interfered in the parliamentary process in the Solomons. For example, Fred Fono, the well-respected Malaita MP who for several years was a strong member of the Opposition, crossed over to the Kemekeza government a couple years ago to everyone’s surprise. When accosted by his supporters about this, he maintained that he was asked to do this by the British and Australian High Commissions to give financial and administrative stability to the Kemakeza government to enable EC STABEX funds to be transferred. He is now the new Deputy Prime Minister, set to take over if Rini is dumped. If this story is true, it is another example of the diplomatic community’s short-, rather than long-term thinking. Between this kind of interference and RAMSI, the SI risk becoming an Australian puppet state (at least that is the perception, though, of course, Australia and RAMSI strongly deny it) — but, as last week’s events show, it is hard to control all the people who feel that they are part of a puppet state (whether it is a puppet state or not), especially as the conditions of their economic life go down and down, and those perceived as pulling the strings and their helpers seem to get richer and richer.
(5) The arrival of a PNG police contingent begs many questions. I wonder if it is even in Australia’s best interest, as PNG RAMSI personnel are well known for complaining about Australia, and only help to fan anti-Australian sentiment within RSIP and the communities where they serve. I am told that one of the first lots of PNG RAMSI personnel (when RAMSI first arrived) were sent home fast after they set up a prostitution ring. But PNG RAMSI personnel are liked much more than Australian RAMSI; they are fellow Pacific Islanders.
(6) To RAMSI’s credit, there has been no firing on crowds, though I am sure many would have liked to have, given the barrage of stones. Had this been many other parts of the world, there would have been deaths. Unfortunately, the crowds also probably took advantage of the knowledge that RAMSI would not shoot *at* them. However, a core question remains why a multinational intervention force and the local police force it is supposed to be training and advising, led by a nation with high technology and unlimited financial resources, good communication and transport, and numerous advisors and consultants, were not able to anticipate and control (and, indeed, may have provoked) a small demonstration that got out of hand, not bringing in reinforcements very early (as RAMSI said they could when most military personnel left the country), not containing the demonstrators very early, not acting decisively in any way — resulting eventually in a scale of damage, personal and material, immensely beyond anything that resulted from the “ethnic tension” crisis. “Helpim fren” has turned into “Spoilim fren”. Is RAMSI only “rapid response” (late) after crisis, quick withdrawal, self-satisfaction, confusion when a new crisis comes, then another (late) “rapid response”? Of course, it is easy to criticize after the fact. Even veteran ABC reporter Sean Dorney had left for Australia after covering the elections and did not anticipate such events. Nor can I say I anticipated them, though I have long thought and said that anti-Chinese riots were always a possibility. I think most people anticipated that the “Grand Coalition of Parties” had enough votes to win and did not realize the capacity of the two “old” groupings usually in opposition to one another to band together to defeat it.
I think the road ahead will continue to be rocky. Australia and RAMSI need independently to assess where they now are, and not just uncritically back the elected government, whose mandate is weak indeed. (Such a consultation and assessment should be done with real Solomon Islands organizations on the ground — such as churches and community groups, rather than by highly paid outside advisors. Even RAMSI’s own consultation has been defective, very short and rushed visits and a quick exit when the difficult questions begin to be asked.) One only wishes that RAMSI could get away from its constant defensiveness — that it is always right and does nothing wrong — and admit to its mistakes, and not engage in constant self-promotion, which has now royally backfired. I think all would do well to back off a bit, rather than constant tinkering and interference — courting favourite members of the government or opposition, insisting on an Australian Police Commissioner, producing an ever-creasing number of advisors (also travelling by helicopter), etc. The riots are a reassertion of Solomon Islands sovereignty, which has been significantly eroded in the past few years, though, unfortunately, it apparently takes a common enemy to unite all Solomon Islanders. On the other hand, the RAMSI presence is still needed, I would say — particularly if parliamentary government is to continue — as the alternatives (as last week’s events show) are also not very attractive. But the future economic effects on the country of last week’s events, at least short term, are grave and it will take much effort to keep things on a steady keel.
Thank you for your messages of concern and support. I am off to Honiara tomorrow for a couple days of Church meetings (it is “business as usual” for the Church of Melanesia, having survived MEF-occupied Honiara and the aftermath) and will report after that visit. Warm wishes, Bishop Terry Brown, Bishop of Malaita, Auki, Malaita Province.
*23 April 2006*
Dear Friends,
Just a few notes from Honiara on a Monday morning.
(1) It is now half past ten and there hasn’t been a moment since I woke up that there have not been helicopters circling overhead, some of them quite low. I suppose this is part of the RAMSI big-stick approach. The Parliament is meeting to elect a Deputy Speaker (Sir Peter Kenilorea returns unopposed as Speaker) and perhaps begin to deal with the vote of no confidence. Surely the Government’s strategy will be to be to paint the Opposition responsible for the rioting. The PM denies that his Government has ever been involved in corruption or that there is any political significance in what happened last week on the streets of Honiara.
(2) Virtually all shops at Point Cruz, from the National Museum to the Central Market are closed, boarded up, and, of course, one big building near the market is burnt out. And, of course Chinatown is out of the picture. The Central Market is opening and functioning as are the small locally-leased shops there. Unless shops reopen, people will be hungry very soon. Already, people are finding it hard to find food. Banks and airlines are about all that are open. And the Hot Bread Shop.
(3) Rick Hou, Governor of the Central Bank, was on the radio this morning, outlining the economic effects of what has happened — inflation, plunging dollar, unemployment, lack of investment, etc. Already, the SI dollar has taken a big dive.
(4) The police are investigating those who instigated the riots, and have arrested at least one Member of Parliament. Robert Wale, the “People’s Power” spokesperson has been arrested and was not granted bail. The town is full of rumours of who is behind it all.
(5) I have heard a certain amount of anger at RAMSI for just standing around doing nothing as the breaking into shops and looting went ahead at Point Cruz. Apparently no warning shots were ever fired. It seems amazing that rioting went on for days without RAMSI being able to contain it. (Only RAMSI is armed; the local police have effectively been disarmed post-ethnic tension.)
(6) A city that contains only people but minimal economic activity cannot survive long, and I wonder if we are looking at a lot of people eventually returning to their home islands. However, for the moment, not even that is possible, as ships are not allowed to sail as the police look for instigators, looters and loot.
Bishop Terry Brown
*27 April 2006*
Dear Friends,
I write simply a short update on the Solomons situation. I have returned to Auki after four days in Honiara. Auki is returning to normal, with most of the Chinese stores re-opened and the town full of people. Still shipping between Auki and Honiara is somewhat limited, as police try to prevent the flow of suspects and stolen property from Honiara back to Malaita. During my absence, we had a visit from a New Zealand patrol boat but it has gone back. There are a lot of RAMSI personnel about and the town is quiet.
In Honiara, as the Archbishop is away in England, I represented the Church of Melanesia in an initiative of the Governor General for the SICA (Solomon Islands Christian Association) church heads to meet with the Prime Minister and Opposition. So on Tuesday afternoon, led by Bishop Philemon Riti (new General Secretary of SICA and former Moderator of the United Church of the SI) and Archbishop Adrian Smith (RC Archbishop of Honiara), we met alone with the Prime Minister in the Cabinet chambers for an hour, then with the Opposition leader and the full Opposition Caucus at the Iron Bottom Sound Motel. I think we were fairly frank with both parties. On Wednesday morning we met with the Commissioner of Prisons (a RAMSI appointment), the Deputy Coordinator of RAMSI and the Australian High Commissioner. As we were meeting with the latter two, the horns began blaring around Honiara, indicating that the Prime Minister had resigned. As has been reported, Manasseh Sogavare and his Guadalcanal bloc (including some Ministers in new Government) crossed over to the Opposition. When the Prime Minister realized he no longer had the numbers to win the upcoming vote of no confidence, he resigned. This crossover and the PM’s resignation probably prevented another round of Honiara violence, although RAMSI security was very high, with Parliament cordoned off, helicopters all over the place and companies of armed RAMSI military personnel placed in strategic places around town. With the PM’s resignation, Honiara broke out in celebration (even a parade with a float) and a few stores re-opened. The price the Opposition had to pay was to sacrifice their leader, Joel Tausinga, and offer the Opposition leadership to Sogavare.
Out of the police investigation of the riots, two Opposition Members of Parliament have been arrested. The Opposition claimed RAMSI interference in the Parliamentary process, in effect, favouring the Rini Government by depriving the Opposition of two votes on the floor of Parliament, especially as up until now RAMSI has gone rather easy with Kemakeza and Rini despite all the criminal allegations against them. However, the allegations are very serious, with witnesses, and one of the two already has a criminal record (not to mention a major reputation for corruption rivaling that of those the Opposition are opposing) and if the Opposition has any sense, should expel him. In the end, the decision whether to release or bail out the two to enable them to take part in the Parliamentary process over the next few days has not been a RAMSI one but been left to the High Court, which as of today, is refusing bail (a decision I agree with). However, the Opposition managed to bring down the government without those two votes.
The rumours are that Sogavare has been promised the nomination as Prime Minister by the Opposition. If this is true, it is highly problematic. Sogavare took over as Prime Minister after the Malaita Eagle Force coup in 2000 and there are many indications that he knew the coup was coming and even encouraged it. (It has hard to imagine him and Bart Ulufa’alu, the PM deposed in the coup as bedfellows, but as they say, ….) Sogavare has told people that he has been guided in his political activities by communicating with the spirit of the deceased former PM, Solomon Mamaloni, who has told him that at all costs he must stay in power. As leader of the Social Credit Party, he has some strange economic ideas. I cannot imagine that the international community would be happy with him and that he was the first to be eliminated in the election for PM last week suggests that in a secret ballot he would lose. This coming weekend will be spent in another round of negotiations to produce the list of PM candidates for the election of a new PM by Parliament early next week. If the outgoing government can produce a candidate untainted by corruption, they may still have a chance. It is sad that the old generation simply will not step down to let new people take over.
Of course, there is much soul searching, especially by the churches (by even by the general public, as almost all of Honiara’s stores remain closed). Many simply stood and watched, but there were cases of whole families, students in school uniforms, children, the elderly, etc., participating in the looting. The destruction, as I mentioned, was especially directed at the “new” Chinese and most of the “older” Chinese stores in Chinatown were not targeted. This suggests some planning. There was no loss of life, and there were tales of heroism of ordinary Solomon Islanders’ assisting Chinese to swim across the Mataniko River away from the burning buildings. There have been many volunteer Red Cross workers and much food and clothing have been brought to the Rove Police Club. Numbers there are going down as Chinese families are flown out or return to their homes, as the security situation has improved dramatically with the removal of the PM. It is hoped that those Chinese who opt to stay will begin re-opening their shops. (Many of their local staff have remained loyal and are guarding the premises.) One big question is whether insurance will cover the losses.
However, emblematic of the problem are some statistics that reliable banking friends have shared with me. On the Friday after the riots, when the banks reopened, the ANZ Bank in downtown Honiara at Point Cruz had SI$24 million (US$ 3 million) in cash deposits, while the NBSI had SI$10 million in cash deposits, mostly from Chinese. If one adds the unknown figure deposited at Westpac, one might be looking at SI$50 million (US$6 million) from the Chinese community suddenly coming out of hiding. (One depositor alone is said to have made a SI$6 million deposit.) On a smaller scale this phenomenon was true even in Auki. My impression is that the Chinese have never entirely trusted the banks (not wanting their wealth to be known, perhaps evading the tax man, making it easier to deal in overseas currency transactions ad hoc, etc.). Of course, many Chinese hope to remit these funds to Australia and other places overseas but the Central Bank and commercial banks have put strict controls on how much money can be sent out of the country at this time. (The economy has been steadily improving and the country presently has good overseas reserves.) At the same time, it has been pointed out that Patrick Leong, naturalised Chinese owner of the Pacific Casino Hotel complex, though he has lost millions, never ever paid a cent of tax to the Solomon Islands government. While RAMSI advisors have come into the Ministry of Finance, forcing compliance in tax payments by local businesses (and churches), their arm has not reached to the Chinese business interests protected by the previous government, where the real money is.
Much more can be said. There seem to be good supplies of rice, other foodstuffs and fresh produce. Some Chinese wholesalers have reopened in (new) Chinatown. It is the retail sector that has taken the hit. But if things stabilize, I think Honiara will recover. But many consciences and programmes (or lack of them) need to be examined, including those of the churches, the government, foreign governments and NGOs, in their failure to make much of a dent on the large population of unemployed or underemployed male youths in Honiara. They have finally, unfortunately violently, stood up and said “we are important too”.
Thank you for all your messages of support and encouragement. Bishop Terry Brown
As I was riding my bicycle into work today I saw protestors outside the state capitol demonstrating in support of immigrant’s rights. Honolulu is a long way away from the US-Mexico border, and I’m sure that several of the protestors where there more because they’d support _anything_ that was anti-Bush than because immigrant’s rights was an issue spoke directly to their personal experience. But it was still heartening to see them out there.
It seems that a lot of people today think of the struggle for decent wages and equality and so forth to have begun with the civil rights era. They forget about thre progressive movements and labor unrest of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Chicago — where today people are celebrating the 120th anniversary of the “Haymarket Strike”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Riot the memory of the strike has been completely expunged from the geography of the city and is only now beginning to be re-incorporated, this time as a monument to the workers rather than the police. The ‘extreme’ demands of the Haymarket strike was an 8 hours working day.
The tragedy of the Haymarket strike was not the unfortunate death of the police officers or strikers who were killed in the course of it, although of course those deaths were tragic. It was the aftermath — in which the government hanged four people who helped organized the strike, holding them responsible for the actions of a person who threw a bomb into a line of policemen, killing several of them. There was no proof — it was death by association. I wish I could say that today in this country the law followed the dictates of reason and justice rather than summary judgement, paranoia, and fear, but unfortunately that isn’t always the case.
So I see today’s march in Chicago — of _three hundred thousand people_ — as having a long and honorable genealogy. For those interested in following the demonstrations going on in Chicago today “Gapers Block”:http://gapersblock.com/ which reccomends “flickr searches”:http://flickr.com/photos/search/tags:immigration%2Cchicago/tagmode:all/ and “Trib updates”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/custom/newsroom/chi-060501immigration-rally-snapshots,0,4426951.story?coll=chi-homepagepromo440-fea about the march. They also point to a “new book on Haymarket”:http://flickr.com/photos/jvoves/138538875/. Of course since I’m in the middle of the Pacific by the time I get done blogging about all this events in Chicago will already have taken place.
Weird that “Galbraith passing away”:http://flickr.com/photos/jvoves/138538875/ today as well.
I think of Tolukuma as being unusual in PNG as the only mine in the country that doesn’t have a road (or sea access) to its plant. This doesn’t mean that they haven’t had ‘landowner problems’ — in fact they are also, so far as I know, the only mine in PNG which has incorporated immigrants into the group of stakeholders it consults with. And now there’s “even more gold there”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/050106/business1.htm. Good news for (now) Emporer.
Now if they can just avoid dropping any more of that cyanide as they helicopter it up to the mine site.
Oxfam has a “great page on Tolukuma’s social and environmental issues”:http://www.oxfam.org.au/campaigns/mining/ombudsman/2004/cases/tolukuma/index.html. DRD’s “Tolukuma page”:http://www.drd.co.za/def_main.asp?PathId=Our_Mines/Tolukuma.asp&MineId=6 still have PDFs of the “2004 ‘Social Responsibility Report’”:http://www.drd.co.za/our_mines/pdf/tgm_soc_resp_final.pdf and “newsletters”:http://www.drd.co.za/Our_Mines/pdf/Tolokuma_Times/tolukuma_dec05.pdf distributed around the mine site which are wonderful ethnographic documents in themselves. UH’s own “East-West Center”:http://eastwestcenter.org/ has an “abstract”:http://pbc.eastwestcenter.org/Abstracts2005/Abstract2005Singh.htm about the spill.
Enven though it’s been a long time since Martha Nussbaum supervised my MA and I lost contact with a college friend who went on to study with Josh Cohen, I’ve still kept in touch with the “Boston Review”:http://www.bostonreview.net/. It’s a politics and literature rag done in a popular style by academics. They’ve always been particularly good about putting their stuff online, even though their website has not been nearly as fancy as that of some journals. But just recently I visited and noticed they now have an RSS feed and have gotten around to putting there “Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR22.5/toc.html debate online as full text. I use this debate in my intro anthro class all the time and highly reccomend it.
So congratulation and thanks to the Boston Review for opening up their content and providing an RSS feed for their site!
It’s hard keeping up with all the personnel changes that happen at Porgera. In 2004 Brad Gordon was (iirc) the mine manager and in the past couple of years he’s jumped from that to being managing director and is now “working for Empire”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/042806/business2.htm.
A few days ago Greg Sheridan, an editorialist for “The Australian”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/ published a piece entitled “Melanesia is a Huge Disaster”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18864013-25377,00.html and a recent “follow-up”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18938962-25377,00.html (he is the author of other pieces with similarly punchy titles, included an editorial last month entitled “The Iraq War is a Noble Cause”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18566827-25377,00.html). The proximate cause of the article is the recent unrest in the Solomon Islands (more of which later) but in general this is part of the turn in Australia by policy and public opinion types to revive images of the savagery of the region. I personally find Sheridan’s editorial incredibly offensive. But more importantly, as a social scientist with expertise in the region, I think the analysis is incredibly poor. There is no doubt that countries like Papua New Guinea face enormous challenges and have made lots of mistakes. But how can someone write that “Melanesian culture is warlike and tribal, which is why so much of it is devoted to rituals and courtesies designed to avoid conflict” but somehow assume that when “after a democratic election, a mob doesn’t like the choice of prime minister so it tries to storm the parliament” this is the result of ‘Melanesian culture’ _despite_ (rather than _because of_) “three years of effective rule from Australia and coaching in democratic practice by our officials?” And when did ‘Melanesian Culture’ exist in some sort of pristine isolation from things like time or, just to pluck an example out of the air, _imperialism_? Any way the intricacies of the good and bad things about “RAMSI”:http://www.ausaid.gov.au/hottopics/solomon/solomons_ramsi_details.cfm could be discussed at length, but reducing the complex situation in the Solomons to ‘warlike Melanesian culture’ is truly absurd.
All of which is just a prologue to print a group letter to the Australian written by my colleague “Clive Moore”:http://www.uq.edu.au/hprc/index.html?page=21282, author of “New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History”:http://books.google.com/books?id=Sn6-x8lo3a8C&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=hawaii+university+press+new+guinea+clive+moore&sig=2y5wUiLWk_KiDDAqm1LYdTbbvxA and several of his colleagues. The Australian declined to print the letter, so I reproduce it here in full with his permission.
School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics
The University of Queensland21 April 2006
The Editor
The AustralianDear Sir,
Greg Sheridan’s scare mongering, in calling Melanesia “a huge disaster†(The Australian, 20 April) is insulting and unproductive. The riots that occurred in Honiara were the expression of deep-seated frustrations at flawed political processes and a lack of reconciliation needed after the earlier unrest. They were sparked when RAMSI mishandled the situation at Parliament. RAMSI ignored the plea by the Speaker, Sir Peter Kenilorea, not to use tear gas on his people.
The Melanesian way is to respect their elders and several of the ex-Prime Ministers (including Sir Peter) were willing to talk to the people who had gathered at Parliament. RAMSI did not give them a chance. The result was violence and destruction.
RAMSI has never been able to deal with a central conundrum: the conflict between strengthening the government apparatus, and having to also prop up a government that was flawed and of which the people remain suspicious. The new Prime Minister Snyder Rini is from the old government.
There is quite obviously a deep resentment against Asians, particularly but not only the Chinese. The democratic process is indigenously controlled but business is not. Perceived inordinate Asian influence on the political process frustrates the average Solomon Islander.
There is not a Solomon Islands-wide crisis, and certainly not a “Melanesian-wide crisisâ€. Mr Sheridan’s Melanesia is full of rampant sexual transmitted diseases and failing states. Has he ever noticed that eighty-five percent of the people of Melanesia are living happily in villages? This is a Honiara-centered crisis. Democracy and egalitarian behaviour is basic to Melanesian culture. Imposed government structures more suitable to First World nations are not. And neither is having forces outside Parliament buying votes in Parliament.
Though it is little acknowledged by those who think RAMSI was the beginning and end of progress in the Solomons, the 400 thousand-odd village majority of the country maintained its own law and order for five years without police presence or functioning courts. How long would Mr Sheridan give Cronulla if all police, firefighters and other public services evaporated? Weeks? Days? Hours? To label the people of the Solomons primitive on the back of two days of rioting is not only insulting but profoundly ignorant. Reducing complex historical problems to labels and scare mongering does disservice to Solomon Islands and undermines Australia’s efforts to assist.
The Australian government and RAMSI needs to spend a little more time learning to understand Solomon Islanders and their cultural triggers.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Clive Moore, CSI, History, University of Queensland (c.moore@uq.edu.au)
Professor Kevin Clements, Director, Australian Center for Peace and Conflict Studies University of Queensland (k.clements@uq.edu.au)
Dr Anne Brown, Australian Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Queensland (anne.brown@uq.edu.au)
Dr Volker Boege, Visiting Fellow, Australian Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Queensland (v.boege@uq.edu.au)
Dr John Roughan, Honiara (jroughan@welkam.solomon.com.sb)
Paul Roughan, Islands Knowledge Institute (proughan@gmail.com)
I’ll be spending the next couple of days blogging about the Solomon Islands but I thought I’d post a link to a longish “piece on Matisyahu”:http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=225 over at “Nextbook.org”:http://www.nextbook.org/ which sounds like an excellent arts and culture website for 30-something reformed Jewish intellectuals, if 30-something reformed Jewish intellectuals like me had time to read all that stuff. Honestly, as a professor the last thing I want to do after a long day of reading is _read_. But it seems like it might be up your alley.
I’ve been listening recently to the “Ars Nova Singers”:http://www.arsnovasingers.org/ who are one of the few groups who exactly the music I like: Renaissance and 20-21st century. I seem to remember having sung with someone who had previously sung with them but I’m not sure now of his affiliation. At any rate their CDs are well-programmed and “All Sky: New American Choral Works”:http://www.arsnovasingers.org/nar-004.htm is particularly tasty. The other thing I like about them is that they’re currently planning a performance of Carmina Burana with “Colorado’s pre-eminent low-flying trapeze and aerial dance-theatre company”:http://www.frequentflyers.org/ (I wonder how much competition there is?). I have other recordings of the stuff on After Sky, some of which I prefer over the Ars Nova version. But there’s no taking away from the group’s performance, or how well the CDs flows as a single program of music. So check them out.
If “Allguiness”:http://drmandrake.blog-city.com/ were a professor, he would write “Anonymous Professor”:http://drmandrake.blog-city.com/ which features such great entries as the one entitled “yet another thing I hate hearing my students say”:http://drmandrake.blog-city.com/yet_another_thing_i_hate_hearing_my_students_say.htm which reads, in its entirety:
I really hate it when one of my students says to me that “My wife and I” or “My husband and I” are trying to get pregnant.
Do you think I really give a fuck that you are fucking?
Thank god it’s Friday.
You know, sometimes people ask me whether I think it’s a good idea, professionally speaking, for me to blog. My answer to them is: there are bloggers and there are bloggers. Jedi fan fiction is one thing. Anonymous Professor is quite another. Who can blame the unbloggwise when they get hot under the collar about entries like this one? And that’s only one of the most temperate of entries from AP. The key point to realize is that not all academic bloggers are like this one.
But I also have to admit I find it very very funny. Inappropriate, sad, and setting themselves up for a fall. But hilarious.
My latest op-ed piece for “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/ is now available and you can “read it here”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/04/17/golub. I’m happy with the piece, at least stylistically, but it is a lot more personal than a lot of the blogging I’ve done recently (although still I think perfectly acceptable professionally). As usual, the snarky comments from IHE’s readership have already begun.
I subscribe to RSS feeds, email lists, websites and every other conceivable genre of information that can be shoveled through my eyes and into my brain by the intarweb. Yet without a doubt my optic nerves tingle with glee from the informal email list that has developed between me and my two good homies “J Niimi”:http://home.uchicago.edu/~jniimi/ (you must all buy his “excellent book”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826416721/sr=8-2/qid=1144786501/ref=sr_1_2/002-3783494-2858434?%5Fencoding=UTF8) and “Seth Sanders”:http://www.arts.cornell.edu/nes/faculty/sanders.html. To honor our sacred and holy union of brotherhood I pass along this url from from master content filter Niimi:
IRAQI: IS THIS THE CLAP YOUR HANDS ALBUM
AMERICAN SOLDIER #2: “YES THEIR HARDWORKING DIY AESTHETIC WILL CRUMBLE YOUR SPIRIT”:http://riffmarket.blogspot.com/2006/04/camp-nama-not-riff-friendly.html
These are some phrases that I’ve read today that struck as cutting to the chase about the nature of the universe. Why? I don’t know. I just liked them:
experiential irresolvability — sometimes the answer is not more data, but better theorizing.
unrealistic career management strategies — used to describe Sapir’s biography, but a euphemism I will almost definitely have to use at some point in the course of serving on academic committees.
tethered to ecological rationalism — said of misperceptions aboriginal Australians.
it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken — From “the computer world”:http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html. I think there’s a lesson here for all of us.
Some quick links for people trying to turn Google Earth’s pictures of PNG into intelligible maps:
“Ethnologue maps”:http://www.ethnologue.com/show_map.asp?name=PG — Ethnologue has made PNG language maps available for free consultation on the web. Vaguely remember Hogbin’s _The Leader and the Led_ and want to find Wogeo? Look no further. The comfortingly bounded, internally discrete, color-coded language groupings here are soothingly panoptic. *Sigh* if only ethnicity and culture really worked that way. Well at least it is good for finding stuff.
“Airstrips of Papua New Guinea”:http://users.bigpond.net.au/billsview/airstrips.htm — A quick way to locating towns and patrol posts. You can enter the lat/long coordinates in Google Earth and it will zoom right in. Paiela is listed as 0522.40 14258.48 — just put 05 22.40′ S 142 58.48′ E into Google Earth and it’ll zoom right in.
If some truly brave soul wants to create a complete set of Airstrip placemarks and email it to me, I’ll make it publically available — I know this information is coded somewhere, but not somewhere as easily findable as my blog, and not for free. Alternately let it be known that I’m also collecting coordinates for people’s fieldsites, so if you want to email me the placemark where you did fieldwork do that and I’ll add you to The Big List. But more on that project for another time.
UPDATE:
“fallingrain.com”:http://www.fallingrain.com/world/PP/ has many lat/long coordinates of places. Curiously organized and random, but still useful.
“Geonet name server PNG locations”:http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntyfile/pp.zip — Official USA Government Stuff
So cool: you can go to “HonoluluTransit.org”:http://honolulutransit.org/ and check out all the planning for what will — hopefully — be our brand new mass transit system. There are four possible routes that you can take a look at, including “how close it will get to my house”:http://honolulutransit.org/more_info/library/files/Alternative%204%20-%20Section%205.pdf (1 meg PDF). Yeah mass transit!
You know, at the end of the day the fact of the matter is that despite some infelicities, I’m pretty happy with Andrew Huff and the Pool of Lost Souls.
The University of California Press tells me that Holly Wardlow’s new book, “Wayward Women”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10451.html is finally out. The topic is important and Holly is smart and her previous work has been excellent. And best of all, since _Wayward Women_ will be coming out in paper, it will be SEVENTY DOLLARS LESS than “her other book”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0754643123/sr=8-3/qid=1143051987/ref=sr_1_3/002-5846516-4008032?%5Fencoding=UTF8
The latest installation of Lightsaber Without A Key is now available: “read it now!”:http://www.alwaysblack.com/?p=230#more-230. In fact, you can “read ‘em all”:http://www.alwaysblack.com/?cat=16 if you like.
I was re-watching “Withnail and I”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094336/ recently. In the ‘making of’ bonus feature one of the producers remarks that it is “the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of the 1980s.” That sent a light bulb off in my head — in terms of fans, followers, and plot, it is actually the British Big Lebowski. Or maybe the feature-length version of the “The Young Ones”? But it’s missing the ska soundtrack.
I forgot how much I liked the film, as well as what a following it had. Some good soul has put “the entire script”:http://www.nasastooge.fsnet.co.uk/withnail/withnail-index.html on-line with audio from key quotes as well (the full script with stage directions is “here”:http://corky.net/scripts/withnail.html.)
“Balls. We want the finest wine available to humanity. We want them here, and we want them _now_!”:http://www.nasastooge.fsnet.co.uk/withnail/sounds/finewine.wav
My favorite line is actually:
Withnail:
At some point or another I want to stop and get hold of a child.
Marwood:
What do you want a child for?
Withnail:
To tutor it in the ways of righteousness and procure some uncontaminated urine.
But they didn’t have a .wav for that one.
MySpace has been about music and bands for some time now, and there have always been some hip young classical musicians with a MySpace page. But this is out of control — Naxos (which formerly demonstrated its digerati chops by signing up with Emusic etc. etc.) now has a “MySpace page”:http://www.myspace.com/NaxosLabel. Crazy, daisy.
I love the short radio program “Earth and Sky”:http://www.earthsky.org/shows/show.php?date=20060422 for many reasons — mostly having to do with the poetic compactness of its title and byline. But now it also features one of my favorite anthropologists — Paige West — talking about gold mining! Go Paige go! One quick note however: Paige says that “When you have a mine, you have to have a road. And when you build a road into a roadless area, lots of people come in . . . then you’re going to have disease that comes in . . . people are going to have access to alcohol, to guns, to all sorts of things.” This is not actually true, technically — if I remember correctly, the Tolukuma mine has no road going into it and all supplies are flown in and out. I know little about the prospect that Paige mentions, but given its likely size and location it’s not inconceivable that this would work for Maimafu. Of course not having a road hasn’t really spared Tolukuma from having guns and people coming in — but it certainly has blunted what could have otherwise been quite a nasty impact. Of course the flip side of delivering all of your supplies via helicopter means things like accidentally spilling cyanide over bits of Gulf Province. So I guess you win some and you loose some.
Paige works on environmentalish related stuff in PNG, so maybe this is also a good post to mention “Forest Trend’s”:http://www.forest-trends.org new report on “logging in PNG”:http://www.forest-trends.org/documents/publications/PNG2006/png.php which actually got PNG a nod on “CNN”:http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/02/27/png.logging/.
LWOAK IV is now live and “you can read it at AlwaysBlack”:http://www.alwaysblack.com/?p=224 other less important projects like my dissertation and professional career as well as AB’s busy stable of writers has meant this one has been some time in coming, but I’m submitting the next one tonight if it kills me and we should pick up some more normal schedule in the future.
I admit: like everyone else who plays Civ IV I am in love with “the opening track”:http://sushi-delight.blogspot.com/2005/11/baba-yetu.html composed by “Chris Tin”:http://christophertin.com/biography.html and performed by “Talisman”:http://www.stanfordtalisman.com/html/frames.htm. Sure, in a post-Graceland, post-Lion King world this sort of thing sounds derivative, and Talisman’s website has loud music playing by default. But “just listen to it”:http://christophertin.com/samples/BabaYetu.mp3 (link to MP3)! I think Civ IV is one of the best-designed games EVER, and the entire thing oozes with classy, thoughtful presentation. While the soundtrack concept owes something to EU II, it avoids being a ‘greatest hits’ soundtrack (with the exception of the Allegri Miserere) and features John Adams in the modern period. That’s classy. Also the game has managed to jettison most of the ugly racist unilinear evolution evident in earler incarnations, and the opening sequence is heavy on the optimistic hope of global progress and low on blood and gore quotient. And there are, afaik, no Hot Coffee sequences squirrled away in any of the wonder movies. Way to go Sid — and especially way to go Chris Tin and Talisman!
Some day I want to write a paper emphasizing the personalistic nature of kiap rule during Papua New Guinea’s colonial period, perhaps by discussing it in terms of the ‘heroic’ mode of history Sahlins discusses in Islands of History. Where were PNGians supposed to learn about bureaucratic rationality when they were governed by this sort of system? And is it really surprising that ‘corruption’ today takes the form of an equally personalistic (but less disciplined) form of governance.
Someday, someday.
I don’t put too much store in these things, but it is worth pointing out that the “Grammy nominations for classical albums”:http://www.grammy.com/GRAMMY_Awards/Annual_Show/48_nominees.aspx#30 are up (but not easy to find) on the Grammy website. As a diagnostic of a very particular take on classical music it’s interesting enough. Naxos’s Penderecki and Bolcom albums get multiple mentions, which almost makes me rethink my opinion of Bolcom. Hyperion is doing another recording of Lauridsen’s _Lux Aeterna_ to compete with the one from the LA Master Choral (or whatever they’re called). While I have no doubt that anything that comes out on Hyperion will be superb, I do wonder whether we need more recordings of this piece — on the one hand, the original recording is superb (and itself a Grammy winner iirc) and on the other hand since all of Lauridsen’s pieces sound so much alike, they could have recorded new material and still have produced the same album. What else? A new recording of Britten’s _Death In Venice_ (with Michael Chance rather than James Bowman) which definitely is underrecorded. The album of Carlo Chavez’s chamber music gets multiple nods. Ho hum. My far and away favorite piece of classical music this year is without a doubt Toby Twining’s utterly superb “Chrysalid Requieum”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000067DOM/002-8806560-6968065?v=glance&n=5174.
Part III of LWOAK is “now available”:http://www.alwaysblack.com/?p=215 at the always fine always black.
Excuse this moment of social theory geekery, but it looks like “Liberty Fund”:http://www.libertyfund.org/about.htm will be publishing “John Millar’s”:http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/millar_john.htm “The Origin Of The Distinction of Ranks”:http://www.libertyfund.org/details.asp?displayID=1967 edited by “Aaron Garrett”:http://www.bu.edu/philo/faculty/garrett.html in the next couple of months (“full text”:http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/millar/rank here via McMaster’s excellent “Archive for the History of Economic Thought”:http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/). This book was very influential in shaping the evolutionary theory of the nineteenth century and is one of the key texts for understanding the Scottish Enlightenment. But it has never gotten the attention it deserves due to its eratic publishing history. It was last printed in a 1960 edition and before that in 1806! While Liberty Fund’s libertarian bias is immediate and obvious, they produce handsome volumes of difficult-to-find classics of social theory edited by professional philosophers and historians. And they do so _cheap_ — you can by their two-volume edition of _Wealth of Nations_ for US$15! The Millar is only going to be US$12. While I have no idea when I fill find the time to refresh my knowledge of the Scottish Enlightenment I know that I will have difficulty staying away from this one.
There’s a fascinating editorial in _The National_ (one of Papua New Guinea’s top newspapers) entitled “Socery and Witchcraft Hinder Development Process”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/011706/column5.htm. Sorcery and witchcraft allegations have long been linked to social leveling, particularly on the coast, where open conflict is simply not acceptable the way it is in the highlands, where I work. The hunting and killing of ‘witches’ in the highlands is something that I heard about when I was living in PNG, and is apparently becoming more common — I have a colleague who writes extensively on this issue and was in the middle of a couple of cases of this sort of thing. Why this is happening is unclear — persecuting witches (particularly females) is a new development in the highlands, not ‘traditional’ (although, to be sure, it’s rooted in deeply-held culturally specific logics). Its also part of the wider trend that makes anthropological concerns about ‘cultural relativism’ increasingly moot in highlands PNG today. It doesn’t take much moral certainty to oppose the execution of ‘witches.’ Writing about this sort of thing, which is of pressing importance socially for Papua New Guineans today (hence the editorial) often brands one as ‘exoticizing the other’ or ‘denying their coevalness.’ But of course sorcery and witchcraft is not something the anthropologist made up, nor is its importance as a problem to be addressed in PNG an agenda imposed from the outside.
One of my new years resolutions was to be more active in blogging stuff that I found in the news about my fieldsite, the Porgera gold mine in Enga province. Both “The National”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/011306/nation4.htm and “The Post-Courier”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20060113/business.htm are reporting that a three-day strike is underway in Porgera. The cause of the strike — at least according to the newspapers, one can never be too sure about what is actually going on on the ground in Porgera — is Barrick Gold’s take-over of Placer Dome. Placer Dome is the majority shareholder in the unincorporated joint venture which operates the mine, the PJV. I’ve been following Barrick’s bid — at first Peter Tomsett, CEO of Placer Dome (and no stranger to Porgera), advised investors against the take over, but after (as I understand it) a better offer was made Placer Dome went ahead with the deal.
I have no idea how Barrick’s take over will affect Placer, but give how these things work I expect that there would not be too many changes on the ground in Porgera. Nonetheless, people appear to be striking. Porgerans have many (MANY) different ideas about how international finance works, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they felt the take over signalled the end times, a nullification of their agreement with Placer (and hence and opportunity to renegotiate an even sweeter deal with the PJV), or simply an opportunity to shake things up. It could be that the workers genuinely believe they are all going to be fired because their contracts are not with Barrick, but with Placer. Ianal, but this seems extremely unlikely to me. Not only are their contracts (according to the mine manager) with the PJV and not Placer, but this is simply not how corporate take overs work.
Anyway it is unfortunate that the National and the Post only quotes the PJV side of the story and gave the mine manager room to speak. It would have been interesting to see what the miners themselves thought. Ben Imbun has studied miners in Porgera, and has found that labor relations, although couched in terms of class, are actually about ethnic Engan solidarity in the ethnically Ipili Porgera valley. This is true in my experience as well — Engans aren’t landowners, so their slice of the pie (other than marrying Ipili) is to connect themselves with the valley by entangling themselves with the mine via employment. I wonder how this strike plays amongst Ipili within the Special Mining Lease?
Finally, I was surprised to see that Phil Stephenson is now mine manager. Last I heard Brad Gordon was the mine manager, and Phil has been put in charge of some place out in Australia. I remember Phil from my fieldwork, when he was just senior staff. At the time I had the impression that thoughts were being given for his future, and I wasn’t surprised. He struck me as an inquisitive, thoughtful, and genuinely sweet person of obvious intelligence.
You know, people obsessed with their pets have generated an infinite amount of websites about them, and almost none of them are actually very good. Some are, though. Like this picture of “St. Francis of Assisi and a Corgi”:http://www.mycraftshowroom.com/8×10-stfrancis/8×10-StFrancis-Corgi-Pem-new.jpg. “Obeythepurebreed.com”:http://www.obeythepurebreed.com also gets points for effort. Despite being derivative of the mighty Gapersblock web hipster aesthetic, the retro socialist realism and photoshopping deserve mention. As does the “My PUG is so EVOLVED that in comparison your HONORS STUDENT is like a primitive fish with legs” bumpersticker. Plus also they appear to have gotten behind the Malamute and not the Husky, which is a move I can support.
And, just to top it off, I got an email from Maurice Godelier recently describing a Baruya myth in which dogs loose the ability to speak with humans after being shot through the penis with an arrow. Not _that’s_ entertainment.
“Part two”:http://www.alwaysblack.com/?p=210 is available over at Alwaysblack’s place. If anyone can come up with a better acronym than “LWOAK” or a short nickname, then please let me know.
I normally don’t go out of my way to point out Lorenz Khazaleh’s great “anthropology.info”:http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/ website because I assume by now that everyone already knows about it and is reading it along with me. Howevever, at the start of the new year I thought I would make an exception in this case and second Oneman’s “reccomendation”:http://savageminds.org/2006/01/06/the-year-in-review/ of Lorenz’s “year in anthropology roundup”:http://antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/index.php?p=1587&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1. It’s not only a great over view of what happened, but it’s also a reminder of all of the amazing thing that happened in the anthropological noosphere. It’s just crazy, daisy.
Although Lorenz intended the post to make the point that “2005 can be characterized as the year anthropology finally became visible on the internet” I hope he decides to make it an annual feture of his blog, that we will read more of them for many years to come, and that all of them are full of as many signs of collaboration and community as this current one.
Now: when are we going to get around to the year characterized by a sudden and uncontrollable growth of interest in gradcore Jedi fan fiction?
A state auditor has released “a report”:http://www.state.hi.us/auditor/Reports/2005/05-15.pdf on the state of UH finances which is universally being described as “sharp” and which claims UH “cannot fully ensure fiscal accountability.” The university has published a “response”:http://www.hawaii.edu/offices/eaur/govrel/otherdocs/SystemFinAuditPhI-12-2005.pdf. A nice summary of these two documents is available from “UH News”:http://www.hawaii.edu/cgi-bin/uhnews?20051230114534.
Heh. I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 and the backend is VERY pretty. Also: yeah instant category adds!
Today my blog turns four. On previous anniversaries I was able to reflect back on the blog’s history and its twists and turns over time. After four years, however, these begin to fade into the background. Come to think of it — what did I do this year? A year ago I had just moved to Hawaii and finished my first semester teaching fulltime, and was struggling to finish my dissertation. In the 365 days since then I’ve defended my dissertation, gained experience and confidence teaching, started Savage Minds, released the paper version of AHATPOLS, started the digital version of its sequel, got on the AnthroSource Steering Committee, and sent off a couple of pieces for publication which are _still_ not in print.
Hey, that sounded pretty impressive. But the best part of all: I got engaged. Huzzah!
It’s been a full year for me and I have two more pieces to send off to publishers before break is over, so I’m afraid I don’t have time to wax philosophical even though this is definitely the time to do so. So good luck and keep going and… happy new years everyone!
“Joss throws in the towel”:http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1141343_1_0_,00.html.
It’s interesting — the franchise doesn’t have legs. I wonder if the mythos will?
I’m very proud to announce that the first installment of the next story in the AHATPOLS series is now live on “alwaysblack.com”:http://www.alwaysblack.com. In honor of another famous pulp novel set in Hawaii, it is called “The Lightsaber Without a Key” and you can “read the first part”:http://www.alwaysblack.com/?p=151#more-151 now. I’ll try to post roughly weekly and will let readers know on this blog when new installations are posted.
Now that it is truly started I suppose I’ll have to finish it.
The amazon.com reviews of “David Hasslehoff’s album”:http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B00005Q8UG/102-8716047-1531308?SubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82 are an inspiration to all of us. Very Guy Debord.
A little bit ago I blogged about — or meant to — Reed’s decision not to cooperate with U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings because they were not actually a decent measure of, well, anything. Even so, it’s surprising to find out that “one college ranked in U.S. News just had its accreditation yanked”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/14/southern. This is indicative of something, although what I am not exactly sure.
My new ‘viewpoints’ “piece on being rated by ratemyprofessor.com”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/12/16/golub is now running at Inside Higher Ed.
Amazon has lots of great ‘listomania lists’ but my curremt favorite is “Mothra — Secret Message of ‘Mothra’ — Why Can She be Over Godzilla?”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/2EAAG2EQEYD86/102-8716047-1531308?%5Fencoding=UTF8. Not only does it have an extensive discography of Mothra films, but it drifts off in all sorts of other wonderful directions, including books on nuclear testing in Micronesia, histories of post-war Japanese reconstruction, to Holocaust revisionism. The comments are as random as the items on the list. About “Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right” the author of the list remarks “The rhythm of ‘Mothra’s Song’ is adopted from common one among Indonesian and Japanese traditionals. Now, you know what is symbolized by captured little twin fairies.” EXACTLY.
Other listomania lists by the author include “Books by Edgar Cayce Himself,” “Yes, I still love Edgar Cayce,” “Books About Auto-Urine Therapy,” “Manchuko You May Not Have Known,” and “Best Economical Beethoven Complete Symphony Box Sets.”
EXACTLY.
The Chicago School of Sociology is always something that I’ve wanted to get a better grasp on, but moving to Hawaii has moved this up my priority list. Although many don’t realize it, the sociology department at the University of Hawaii was basically established by University of Chicago Ph.D.s and a lot of the early work on Hawaii’s melting pot and immigrant workers borrowed (in fascinating ways) from the ideas of ecological succession etc. that started in Chicago. I think there may be an article about this somewhere. If not someday I’ll have to write one. Until then, however, this interesting BBC radio program “In The Footsteps of the Chicago Ecologists”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingchicago.shtml will have to tide us over.
From “Baraita”:http://www.baraita.net/blog/archives/2005_12.html#000561
It is really f***ing offensive to claim that this conjunction of December holidays constitutes a Jewish “dilemma.” You want a real dilemma involving Judaism and American culture? Try “whether or not to run errands on Shabbat.” Or if you are too immersed in a certain kind of Jewish world for that to be even be a question in your mind, try “what (if anything) to eat at a non-kosher restaurant, and how to explain it to your lunchmate(s) and/or waitperson.” These dilemmas run up against Jewish fundamentals. What you tell your kids about the white-bearded, red-suited guy in the mall is probably not that kind of dilemma. Indeed, the extent to which Jew Q. Public participates in patently non-worshipful activities vaguely associated with the multilayered pagan-Christian-nationalist festival we call Christmas-And-New-Year is… well, really, a pretty minor issue in the greater Jewish scheme of things. [...] If anything, we Jews should probably be delighted that the midwinter celebrations of our neighbors today have little or no content which can be conclusively identified as _avodah zarah_, sparing us all sorts of nasty halakhic dilemmas. I mean, really, which would you rather find yourself humming songs about as you walk through the mall: the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, or the Birthday of This One Nice Jewish Boy Who Some People Thought Was Anointed By God But We Think Otherwise?
(although personally I think the Hannukah socks stuffed with gelt is a bit too much)
Here’s the latest news about Spink’s sentencing: the Chilliwack Times “reports on his trial and conviction”:http://www.chilliwacktimes.com/issues05/114205/news/114205nn6.html. They also quote my blog — and you can tell they do it accurately because they even include my patented typos!
UPDATE: More on Spink at “an article on MSNBC”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10110633/ (thanks Erin!)
The latest issue of Reed Magazine includes “my remembrance of Gail Kelly”:http://web.reed.edu/reed_magazine/nov2005/columns/End_Paper/index.html. The original (which you can “read here”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=446) appeared on my blog in a massively extended form. I cut it down and sent it off to Reed Magazine, and they have cut it even a bit more. Please add the words “which required us to exchange wampum with them” to the end of the end of the fifth paragraph.
Chapter 4: Very readable, perhaps a bit too cute. But still, a lot of fun to read.
Chapter 5: If only I had time… for just… one… more… revision….
The diss must be off in the mail on Monday, so on I press.
Why is the fifteenth hit on an Amazon.com search for “Bruce Ackerman” — well-known lawyer and historian — the movie ‘Curse of the Queerwolf’? And what does “a young man bitten by a transvestite who undergoes a strange transformation during a full moon” have to do with “the electoral crisis of 1801″:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674018664/002-1728795-4172847?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance?
Talk amongst yourselves.
When fellow college radio DJs Seth Sanders, J Niimi, and I get together in the same room and start talking about music, the air becomes thick with ozone and strange and powerful thoughts start oozing out of our ears and intertwining with one another like a scene out of Dark City. unforunately we have been scattered to the four corners of the earth (or, to be more exact, Chicago, Ithaca NY, and Honolulu) so we’ve greated a group music blog to keep up with what we’re listening to. As a result I am happy to introduce “This Line”:http://www.evil-wire.org/~thisline/, our new MP3 blog. Seth does Death Metal, I do contemporary choral music, and J does Sissy Rock. I am hoping that the blog will take off as I have a very good feeling about these two gentlemen.
While I have managed to aboid preordering Civilization IV, I know that not everyone is as strong as I am. And I think that this is a good tome to remind people that if they have had a hard time dealing with Civilization in past, “there is help”:http://www.civanon.org/home.shtml. Don’t be afraid to reach out.
My god, I thought it would never happen, but it looks like “the Ramu Nickel-Cobalt mine is on”:http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=13911, or at least closer to being on. It will be interesting to see what happens to it. It’s particularly significant that Chinese investment is happening there. A portent of things to come, I’d say…
A new ‘viewpoints’ piece of mine has appeared at “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/24/golub. It’s based on an earlier “Savage Minds blog entry”:http://savageminds.org/2005/09/22/what-you-really-really-want/. Doing an op-ed piece about teaching and the state of the academy when you are as green as I am is, of course, a crazy and hubristic thing to do. But I’ll use the starlet’s excuse: “I was young! I needed the money!” Actually I think the piece has a nice line or two in it, even though I feel like it needs about five or six more revisions. But I think that is just my inner dissertation talking.
A colleague of mine finally got sick and tired of lousy anthropology textbooks and did a sweeping review of the available options. She finally decided that Oxford’s “Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0192853465/qid=1130009100/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-1728795-4172847?v=glance&s=books was the way to go and, having checked out the book, I must concur. It’s a marvel of concision, readability, and thoroughness — perfect to assign short chapter of while moving through ethnography with your students. In fact, the “entire series”:http://www.oup.co.uk/general/vsi/ seems to be absolutely splendid. I mean, they have a very short introduction to _Clausewitz_. The opening paragraph of the very short introduction to Judaism is:
Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? To the botanist it is undoubtably a fruit, to the chef a vegetable, but what would the tomato itself say? if it thought about the matter at all, it would probably have the same sort of identity crisis Jews are apt to get when people try to strait-jacket them as a race, an ethnic group, or a religion. Neither tomatoes nor Jews are particularly complicated or obscure when left to themselves, but they also don’t fit neatly into the handy categories such as fruit or vegetable or nation or religion which are so useful for pigeonholing other fods and people.
What a wonderful little paragraph — exemplary of the concision and verve I urge on my own students. I think there are more of these pocket-sized volumes in my future.
D00d — Naxos has just licensed _it’s entire catalog to Emusic_. I signed up with Emusic back when it had a thriving social network attached to it and featured unlimited, DRM-free MP3 downloads for US$20 a month. Then they got bought out, wiped out all of the reviews and playlists we had written, and instituted a by-the-track fee for downloads. I stayed away for years, but finally rejoined when I moved to Hawaii and they expanded their catalog. It was a grudging return, but they did something I needed, and as a business were making better and better decisions about expanding there catalog. Now Naxos, one of my favorite music labels, is releasing all their stuff on Emusic as well. This is fantastic — Naxos not only has an incredibly deep bench of classical standards, they also provide great recordings of new and unusual classical music. And these are not just reference recordings — Naxos earns Grammys and Grammy nods every year for its fantastically engineered and performed albums from superb but lesser known artists. So whether you want a recording of Vaughan Williams’s House of Life song cycle, the complete Bach motets (indeed, my FAVORITE recording of the complete Bach motets), or a recording of the entire Slichot service “according to the Orthodox rite” they are now available, DRM free, in a way that supports classical music.
An anonymous poster on an earlier entry about indicted drug dealer and former anthropology major “Doug Spink”:http://alex.golub.name/log/index.php?cat=27 has announced that Doug Spink has been “sentenced to three months in a minimum security prison”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=369#comment-17026. I have no idea whether this is true or not — Google News had some brief articles on the trial, but none of them mentioned Spink’s sentence. It looks like the prosecutor was more interested in the people running the ring than in Doug, who was basically a mule.
“Natural Symmetry”:http://naturalsymmetry.com/ is the website of Runjuko Pugh, a Honolulu photographer and SEB student. Although the website is just recently unveiled (and done in Flash), it gives you a chance to see some of her strikingly beatutiful photographs of indigenous Hawai’ian flora. In another life she was a microbiologist, is why.
I have to admit that I walked into Serenity with a chip on my shoulder. While I am not one of those people who walk around wearing “Joss Whedon Is My Master Now” t-shirts, I do think of Buffy as revolutionary, and thought Firefly was very good too. And… and… Ok. I’ll admit it. I _might_ be one of those people who walk about wearing a “Joss Whedon Is My Master Now” t-shirts, and this possibility makes me a little nervouse. As a result, when the lights went down in the theater on Serenity’s opening day, I was ready and determined to like the movie because it was good, not because I was a fanboy. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, the movie not only entertained me, it moved me a little as well. As great as the film was, managed, strange as it sounds, to reaffirm my belief that Joss Whedon is a great master of the medium of television.
First off, the film demonstrates what we all already know — Joss started as a script doctor and will die a script doctor. Serenity manages to be unbelievably tightly written without sacrificing a certain depth as is done in, say, the original Star Wars or Indiana Jones flicks, which are so briskly paced that the dialogue explicates the backstory and character motivations that are necessary to get you to the next fight scene — and little else. So it’s pointless to note that people unfamiliar with the TV series will have no trouble picking up the backstory to the film or that Joss continually writes himself into and out of corners in the film — he’s a script doctor. This is what he _does_.
For those of us who have seen the original series, there are some small differences. In the series, Kaylee is a shy, vulnerable tom boy unsure of how to court her gentleman doctor. In the movie she’s a bit more the randy farm girl saddled with a disasterous masturbation one-liner. Mal is also more darkly drawn. On the show he the strong silent type, a cynical outsider with a heart of gold and unexpected depths of empathy. In the movie he seems not just driven, but much more conflicted. Joss may be going to far when he predicts Nathan Fillion is the next Harrison Ford, but I have to admit that Fillion certainly deserves to be. Adam Baldwin continues to shine as Jayne, and his ability to turn a two dimensional thug intended for comic relief into a three dimensional thug intended for comic relief is a credit both to his own acting abilities and Joss’s ability to write parts that good actors can sound out and round out. Chiwetel Ejiofor equits himself admirably, and Sean Maher is still pretty. Although to be fair to Sean, there points in the film where I heard some scratching coming from inside the paper bag he was trying to act his way out of. Ok that was mean, and he doesn’t deserve it. But I couldn’t let a line like that go.
Of course there isn’t much time for character development in the film. The most important thing about Buffy, in my mind, was its length — a single story arc (reconceived during fliming, but still basically a single story) stretched out over hours and hours of showtime and years and years of production. Joss demonstrated with Buffy that one could develop characters and plots across vast stretches of time while still preserving the coherence of a single episode — providing you had good enough writing. But if Buffy is a marathon, Serenity is a sprint. Joss doesn’t have time to let the characters develop, or let the mythos of his world mature. So instead of capturing our attention with painstaking wrought polyphony, Joss just writes everything with a double forte. The stakes start out high in the movie, and they keep getting higher. We can forgive the occasionally stilted western dialect — laid on more heavily here than in the show — and the intermittent bits of atrocious Mandarin — thankfully rarer in the film — and the “a man’s gotta walk tall” hyperbole because, well, these people’s lives are on the line.
The movie also manages chase and combat scenes well. I’ve never been impressed by the fight sequences in Buffy, but then again, a good fight sequences in a movie can take as long to choreograph, film, and edit together as an entire season of a TV show. Most reviewers were impressed with the “Summer Glau kicks-ass” sections of the film. I thought the choreography was ok — a typical chinese-influenced, LA hybrid thing — and I suppose some people still find it interesting when Joss Whedon writes physical strong female characters dealing with emotional trauma with the help of their gang of friends. I worry that this sort of thing is all he’s ever going to produce. So I fear for Wonder Woman and hope that Joss doesn’t end up being a one-trick pony. Much more interesting to me was the close-up work done by Chiwetel Ejiofor (and his stunt doubles) — a lot of precise short-range work perfectly in keeping with the character. It reminded me of the knife fighting sequence from the end of Brandon Lee’s ‘Rapid Fire,’ an underappreciated film which with a lot of interesting Jeet Kune Do work in it.
I’ve heard Serenity described as the Firefly season finale, but I think of it more as the pilot that Joss never got to make — not surprising, since he’s made no secret of his ambition to resurrect the TV series. As much as I was drawn in by Serenity — and I was — there was something about it that made me feel that while Joss aimed and succeeded in making a great film, what he had really created as utterly superb television. It’s hard to say why I think this — the pacing? The dialogue? The striking (and often elaborate) camera work of someone who _finally_ got the time and money to do all the fancy shots he wanted? I think the true test of the film is if it bears repeated rewatching — I’m not sure it will. Regardless I think he has a much clearer understanding of what he does than Tarantino. The comparison between the two of them is apt — both are from the first (and perhaps last?) wave of directors to grow up working in video stores. “Actors start as waiters — directors start as video store clerks” Joss once remarked. While both Tarantino and Whedon wield the full force of pop culture, Joss continues to deliver great television (even in the movie theater), while Tarantino’s aspirations to ‘art’ (Kill Bill, Foxy Brown) have, in my opinion, failed. Hmm…. now that I think of it it would be interesting to compare Joss to Roberto Rodriguez (they both write music for their scores, tend to be polymaths, etc. etc.). I’ll have to think more about that.
At any rate, calling Serenity superb television is a statement about attitude and atmosphere, not a put down. If anything, the line between television and movies as a genre is fading, and it seems to me that Joss had a lot to do with this. There have always been made for TV miniseries, but the success of through-written, season long shows like Buffy and The Sopranos (and their inheritors such as Six Feet Under), and the rise of high-budget miniseries and microseries such as the Sci-Fi channel’s Dune and Clone War series have demonstrated that there are lots of different genres to experiment with. Crossing over from TV to movies (and computer games, and novels, etc. etc.) is also nothing new — think of the Star Trek franchise. And if anyone has mastered the ability to leverage financially risky undertakings with a fan base, it’s Joss Whedon. It will be interesting to see how and where Firefly finally lands — I for one am dying for more.
Huzzah! That wasn’t hard at all.
Some weirdness may happen to the website as I switch over to my new server. Then again it may not. Hold on a sec.
My wish to read new things outside of my speciality refuses to face the truth of the futility of keeping up with so many areas of study outside of my speciality despite the ever growing piles of things I Still Haven’t Read. Although I on CV I describe this weakness as a ‘research focus’ called ’social theory’ the fact of the matter is that I am a hopelessly addicted amateur intellectual historian (i.e. a Reedie). As a result two relatively new journals caught my eye recently. This first, “Modern Intellectual History”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=MIH, has a recent issue with articles on the history of Ann Raynd and the conservative movement in America as well as an excellent — and for me, very informative — article by Susan “Down From Olympus” Marchand on Orientalism in nineteenth century Germany. The editorial board of the journal is also very impressive, featuring names that even non-specialists like I recognize: David Armitage, Prasenjit Duara, Malachi “the Cohen” Hacohen, Thomas Haskell, Martin Jay, Bruce Kuklick, Anthony Pagden, and Fritz Ringer, to name just a few.
The other journal I stumbled across is the “Journal of Classical Sociology”:http://jcs.sagepub.com/. Don’t let the title fool you — it appears to be dedicated entirely to Max Weber, with occasional excursions into Durkheim and Sombart. For those of us who still thrill to the tables of contents of late 70s/early 80s issues of Economy and Society, the JCS is kind of like Angel — same characters, same writing, but a smaller cast. Plus it has articles with titles like “If Goffman had read Levinas”:http://jcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/2/179. How can you go wrong with that?
The book I’m really waiting for — but won’t be out for some time — is “E.T. Cultures: Anthropology in Outer Spaces”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=929162117653&Bmain.Btitle_option=1&Bmain.Btitle_=&Bmain.Btitle_option=1&Bmain.Btitle=E%2ET%2E+Culture&Bmain.Subtitle_option=1&Bmain.Subtitle_=&Bmain.Subtitle_option=1&Bmain.Subtitle=%3A+Anthropology+in+Outerspaces&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP1&Bmain.subject_BIP1=&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP2&Bmain.subject_BIP2=&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP3&Bmain.subject_BIP3=. My dreams of doing a ‘First Contact’ course that isn’t just about Papua New Guinea continue to percolate…
Now at some level, _all_ Reggae is Jewish. But as the “Bookninja”:http://bookninja.blogspot.com/ points out, “some are more Jewish than others”:http://www.hasidicreggae.com/files/2005/02/07/22/11/33/kimmel_on_stage_2.jpg. But unlike some other novelty bands, “Matisyahu”:http://hasidicreggae.com/, So Called, and the other artists on “Jdubrecords”:http://jdubrecords.org/ are actually pretty quality.
Similarly bending across genres is “Alarm Will Sound”:http://www.alarmwillsound.com/AWS-Home.html , whose latest album features “orchestral arrangements of Aphex Twins tracks”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009XT8KQ/ref=wl_it_dp/002-1728795-4172847?%5Fencoding=UTF8&coliid=I363QKRWD46T0S&v=glance&colid=NK3EH604LU8H. The danger here is of alienating both classical and electronica fans, but apparently the CD — which includes arrangements by “Steven Bryant”:http://www.stevenbryant.com/bio.php — manages to be satisfying to both groups.
Satisfying crossover might be harder to achieve for the “Ahn Trio”:http://www.ahntrio.com/, whose belly-baring marketing is designed to turn off snobby classical music fans like me. But in fact if you look at the contents of their “last”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006JSCQ/ref=ase_ahntrio/002-1728795-4172847?v=glance&s=music “couple”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00004TR18/ref=pd_bxgy_img_2_cp/002-1728795-4172847?v=glance&s=music of albums, they are one of the few groups out there I can think of doing 20th century music for a classical trio — and one of the very few who have actually commisioned new pieces. I personally think the ’string quartet performs Jimi Hendrix/The Doors/Authentic World Music’ thing is _so_ overdone, but I would still be interested to hear some of their stuff.
Currently I’m enjoying Toby Twining’s remarkable “Chrysalid Requiem”:http://www.tobytwiningmusic.com/projects.html, which I highly reccomend to just who can take an earful of challenging (but not off-putting) 20th century music. It’s best described as a cross of the Poulenc mass with some “overtone singing”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throat_singing and “Allen Shearer”:http://class.csueastbay.edu/music/Allen_Shearer.php thrown in.
Update: the Twining requiem is *unbelievably* awesome. Check out the “sample tracks”:http://www.bangonacan.org/store/item.html?sku=CA21007 here).
A reader from an earlier post about my fellow Reed alumn tells me that Doug Spink has pleaded guilty to charges regarding the 169 kilos cocaine the police caught him with, and that his sentencing hearing is coming up. Here’s a snippet from “the comment”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=369#comment-16117:
On February 28, 2005, Douglas Spink was arrested in the Western District of Washington after taking delivery of approximately 169 kilograms of cocaine from Wesley Cornett. Cornett was a courier for Robert Kesling, the owner-in-interest of the cocaine. Investigation establishes that Spink, Cornett, and Kesling were part of a single conspiracy to distribute cocaine and marijuana in the Western District of Washington, and elsewhere. Spink and Cornett have entered guilty pleas to the charges set forth in their indictments and are awaiting sentencing. Kesling is set for trial.
I had no idea there was such a thing as an ‘owner-in-interest’ of cocaine, or anything else for that matter. Despite the fact that Spink was never my friend — or even much of an acquaintance — Google now considers my blog to be the #1 source of information about this case and so if anyone wants to fill the world in on it, the comments would be a good place to do it. I figure that if I can type in all the words to _Nullo in mundo pax_ (the other thing Google thinks my blog is good for) then surely y’all can keep us updated on the Spink trail.
Congratulations to the Independent State of Papua New Guinea on its thirtieth brithday! While it is has been too long since I have been back I think with fondness on the country that was my home for two years, and we will be raising a glass in celebration soon enough. The country faces serious challenges, but not to worry — its “Jesus Year”:http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/jesus_year/ is coming up!
The rest of the month will be a particularly busy time for me as a number of due dates, publications, applications, and courses all align into a crunch time of cosmic proportions. This means I will either not blog at all because I will be too busy, or else I will blog a lot in a desperate attempt to avoid work. Just letting you know.
!http://alex.golub.name/pics/ahatpols_cover.jpg!
After more than a year of hard work I’m very pleased to announce that “Andrew Huff And The Pool Of Lost Souls”:http://alex.golub.name/ahatpols/ is now on sale at lulu.com. “Buy it here”:http://www.lulu.com/content/128306
I am unbelievably grateful to Andrew, Cinnamon, and Naz for all of the hard work and dedication they put into this project. Despite illness, full-time jobs, my own chrulish micromanagement at a distance and their commitment to other, more worthy projects they took the time to help make this dream come true. Thanks so much to each and every one of you. I’m keenly aware of the work’s shortcomings as only an author can be. But it is mine. Or, to be more precise, ours — proof that the intellectual excitement of the blogging scene in turn-of-the-century Chicago can produce overly-academic Jedi fan fiction of the sort rarely seen elsewhere. Also, I’d like to state for the record that I wrote this shit _before_ Whalerider, yo.
The book is published by Lulu.com under the imprint of Poreke Press, a ‘brand’ I hope to use for many print-on-demand open access pieces in the future. It is “available online for free”:http://alex.golub.name/ahatpols/ and is under an Creative Commons license so make as many xeorxes as you want, etc. etc. I’m charging slightly more than it cost to produce it in order to recoup the expense of the ISBN and to save up enough money to buy a listing in Ingram’s, the electronic catalog used by Amazon and everyone else in the world.
The next saga begins around Christmas.
Why? Because the Encyclopedia Brittanica has never even _heard_ of “Spam musubi”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_musubi.
Michael Silverstein is one of the only anthropologists that I know of (if you can think of other candidates let me know) who really has a megatheory for what anthropology is and where it’s going. For those who drink the Silverstein Kool Aid the world resolves into a clarity that you forgot you once had — like getting a new pair of glasses. You begin to see why everyone around you kept chanting “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated” as you lifted the paper cup to your lips.
On the other hand, sometimes the easily-influenced become a little over enthusiastic. You can usually tell who they are by the way they pepper their conversation with the words ‘reticulate’ and (more lately) ‘metalepsis’. For this reason I think there’s something a little over done about “Adamzero”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/AA3YC4CHS5WDG/ref=cm_aya_bc_aya/002-1728795-4172847 and his Amazon list “‘cultural semiotic; language as social action; metapragmatics’”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2MJDVK8ZSADPZ/qid=1125342589/sr=5-2/ref=sr_5_2/002-1728795-4172847, whose title, to be frank, renders his self-description as ‘a Chicago undergrad’ superfluous.
On the other hand, it’s a _really_ good list.
My good friend and sometimes-collaborator Biella ‘m4d0g’ Coleman has redesigned her website apparently — now called”Interprete”:http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/ — and is up and blogging again. So if your subscription to her RSS feed got bj0rked, as mine did (even though her URL stayed the same), go check it out. If you don’t know why you would want to read her, check out these “awesome chapters”:http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-prologue.pdf from “her dissertation”:http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-chapter-six.pdf.
Interestingly enough, I was discussing bodily fluids (always a favorite for Melanesianists) with my class over the summer, and the way that pretty much every culture has pretty strong feelings about semen, blood, feces, urine, and any other bodily discharge even though (and this was my point) what that feeling was was arbitrary and conventional. I gave examples from a couple of different locations. Then someone asked me about farting. I was taken aback. Even ‘the lesser discharges’ such as tears, belching, and so forth are something I know about. But farting? I hadn’t thought about it much, other than lamely suggesting that the student in question check out Norbert Elias. But now, thanks to the Mad Dog, my knowledge of the literature “has been rectified”:http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0312234937.
It is one of the ironies of academic publication in the age of the internet that tracking down full citations for one’s bibliography inevitable turns up 12 bintillion more things you should have read before you wrote the damn thing in the first place. Most recently this includes a very nice looking volume entitled “Tunnel Vision”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A//www.oxfam.org.au/campaigns/mining/women/tunnelvisionreport.pdf&ei=d7EKQ83eA5Lsadzy_ZwO (get it? ‘Tunnel’ vision?! Hardy har har) put out by Oxfam that has brief articles by many of The Usual Suspects. Yeah well-written free-as-in-speech stuff on the internet!
The article is tentatively (and arbitrarily) entitled “Ironies of the Anticommons: Landowners, Land Registration, and Papua New Guinea’s Mining and Petroleum Industry”. I think it is a pretty ‘major’ statement of what I’ve been up to intellectually and I’m happy with it overall, although I’m keenly aware that the more ‘major’ something is the greater your chances of failing or generalizing in a way that makes you look like a big dummy. At any rate given the way things go in academia, it should appear in 2046. I’ll keep you posted.
Hard to fire a gun “with flippers”:http://scotlandtoday.scottishtv.co.uk/content/default.asp?page=s1_1_1&newsid=8631.
After a month of traveling literally from Beijing to Bangor I’ve managed to wrap up a very nice trip to China as well as to my Scarily Erudite Beloved’s parents and future affines). Most of my time was spent knocking around rural China looking for ancient temples and visiting millennia-old graves. This sounds cool, and it was. But trust me — “looking for ancient temples and visiting millennia-old graves” really means “hours and hours taking the bus around rural china.” Nevertheless, I had a wonderful time and have many insights into modern and ancient China, Buddhism, and the human condition more generally. However, since over educated white guys musing on their encounter with East Asian culture is one of the internet’s most overdone cliches, I’ll spare you the details and tell you instead what I thought about the reading I took along.
_The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir_
I got about two pages into this and realized why I disliked existentialism — the endless dreary tone. Also the book is quite challenging and I had little concentration or time to read with a pencil (which I alays do for ‘real’ books I read) so: I didn’t read it.
_The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald_
I’m strangely triangulated to the classics through my time at Reed and Chicago. Picking this up once again is like meeting an old flame and remembering why you first fell in love — and why it couldn’t last. Just comparing the book in my hands — the same one I read my freshman year of college — with my memory of it was interesting. For instance: I forgot Diomedes existed. I was more attuned to the poetry of Fitzgerald’s translation, which was indeed remarkable. But after a while it drops away in front of a narrative which, as my scarily erudite beloved points out, reads like console text of Worlds of Warcraft: “Diomedes attempts mighty cleave against Agithor. Hit (13+12=25 vs 18 AC). Damage: 32 -5 soak. Darkness covers Agithor’s eyes.” The events described resonate more with me now as an anthropologist — I was struck by the irony of people being obsessed with honor and achievement while living in a world where everyone (the gods included) are incredibly permeable to the influence of others. Overall, I was glad I read it. Good to come home. I look forward to reading it again in 2015.
_Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, M.I. Finley_
This is Finley’s contribution to the whole 1970s slavery thing that produced books like _Roll Jordan Roll_. It is very _very_ short and also very technical and very Finley and very well-done. If you’re interested in the topic as a specialist than go for it, but if you’re only going to read one book by Finley (or even one book of essays) this shouldn’t be it.
_We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Philip Gourevitch_
I haven’t seen the film, but the book deserves all the kudos it gets. Excellent. Hats off to Gourevitch. I just wish it had more of a scholarly apparatus (bibliography, index, etc. etc.) — that must mean I’m a professor or something. This definitely fall into the ‘If You Only Had To Read One Book’ category — if you only had to read one book on Rwanda, this is the one. Today Gourvetich’s critcisms of the UN and the world of NGOs is par for the course. At the time it was prescient — he was writing when Kaplan’s ‘Coming Anarchy’ narrative of the post-cold war revival of primordial ethnic hatred was everywhere. Gourvetich historicizes the genocide in Rwanda and has an eye for the nitty-gritty ‘whats-going-on-on-the-ground’ stuff that is truly gratifying — especially when combined with his clear, moving prose.
_The Gold Coast, Kim Stanley Robinson_
Mediocre. Not sufficiently detailed in it’s futuristic background to be interesting alternate history, and not sufficiently well written — despite Robinson’s obvious skills — to hold literary interest. Vaguely interesting as an example of late cold war sci-fi.
_Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman_
Fluff! Fluffy glorious fluff fluff! A picaresque little novel featuring unchallenging, industry standard prose with a gimlet eye. A fun romp.
_A Signal Shattered, Eric Nylund_
While Neverwhere demonstrates how fun it can be to eat the entire bag of chips, A Signal Shattered reminds you why you don’t do it very often. The characters are two dimensional and occasionally downright embarassing — sexy asian cyborg assasin girlfriend anyone? — and despite pretensions to hardness the sci-fi verges on fantasy. I have to admire the brisk plotting and page-turner quality since it managed to get me to finish the book despite its other numerous drawbacks. I wouldn’t reccomend it.
_Melal, Robert Barclay_
I’m a hundred pages away from finish at the moment. Ethnographically rich, but so far the prose is remarkably pedestrian.
_Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree, Albert Wendt_
I was really afraid that I wasn’t going to like Albert Wendt, and in fact the short stories here range from OK to bad. However, Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree is itself superb — I was much more bowled over by it then I thought I would be. There is a lot — a _lot_ more Albert Wendt in my future.
_Tale of the Tikongs, Epeli Hau’ofa_
I was afraid that I was not going to like this slender lampoon of development in the Pacific. It is another book that Pacific academics and policy types have all read. My big fear was that it would not be as good as _Progress at Mbananakoro_ by O.H.K. Spate. Unfortunatly, I was right. Hau’ofa’s stories are good, but they’re not great — and they can be a bit heavy-handed at times. Spate’s send-up of development politics, on the other hand, is wickedly funny and the stereotypical characters — the development worker, the local politico — are much more finely drawn than in Hau’ofa’s work. I feel a bit bad saying this, since one represents the viewpoint of a Pacific Islander and is couched in traditional forms of story-telling and so forth, while the other is written by a former ‘expert’ of the colonial regime. But what can I say — one is better than the other and _Tale of the Tikongs_ is strong, but it’s not the strongest thing Hau’ofa has produced. For that I’d reccomend “A New Oceania: Our Sea of Islands” — an essay I think everyone who has anything to do with the Pacific should read.
_Guests Of The Sheik, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea_
Why isn’t this course being taught in every introduction to anthropology class? Not only is the prose pellucid, but it deals carefully and thoughtfully with issues of gender, religion, fieldwork in a very satisfying way that leaves tons of room open for discussion. And it’s about ISLAM and set in IRAQ which is sort of on people’s radar screen these days, you know. True it is hopelessly heteronormative, and I can see why a certain flavor of 70s feminism might have not found favor with it, but I can already tell this book will be a staple of my teaching for the forseeable future.
_Eon, Greg Bear_
Very satisfying — a bit like _When Worlds Collide_ combined with _A Deepness In The Sky_. A gradual escalation in scale combined with good pacing and three dimensional (if not deeply textured) characterization makes this a good novel depsite its being the Nth reiteration of the Rendezvous With Rama/Ring World theme. I’d reccomend it.
_Consider Phlebas, Iain Banks_
Two pages into this I realized I’d already read it. I meant to take along _Player of Games_. As far as this book goes, I think it was the turning point when I stopped thinking of Iain Banks as ‘wildly inventive’ and began thinking of him as ‘undisciplined’. I like the idea of super-intelligent space ships, though.
_World Enough and Time, Dan Simmons_
Dan Simmons wrote _Hyperion_ and _Fall of Hyperion_, which are two of my favoritist sci-fi books _ever_. So when I saw this collection featured a story entitled “The Ninth of Av” I thought: “aha!” Unfortunately that story sucked, as did the other story in the collection set in the Hyperion universe. The final two stories are worthwhile, and the author’s introduction features some interesting insights into how Simmons thinks about writing and criticism. I don’t think that poorly-understood Foucault and yet another American version of Zen is really the way to go, but it was interesting to see what he thought. This may be worth checking out of the library. Maybe.
_Murmur, J Niimi_
J is a good friend of mine and so I would have felt really bad if I had to write a review of his book and say that it was suck. Luckily this short volume dedicated to REM’s first LP is not suck. In fact its really, really good. The book does an admirable job of tacking back and forth between a very sophisticated discussion of how the equipment used to record the album to personal reminiscence about the 80s zeitgeist into which it was released to the nature of lyrics themselves. The book doesn’t just talk about the kudzu-filled cover — it talks about the natural history of Kudzu in the south. Given it’s small size it’s not clear what genre of book this is supposed to be, and this shows at times when certain narratives are expanded or contracted. Also, J spends a fair amount of time doing ‘boundary setting work’ discussing the nature and function of art criticism, the history of influence, and so forth — a tendency I’d chalk up to the fact that it is his first book, or the akward length he’s been assigned. Luckily, even when the discussion strays from REM to the role of the critic, it is still interesting to see him work through the issues (particularly his relationship with academia). So remember: J Niimi. You heard it here first.
_Joystick Nation, J.C. Hertz_
After a brief flirtation with christmatic megafauna, I’m back on course with the video game project, and doing a lot of remedial reading. This is a classic that everyone but me who thinks about videogames has read, except now, since I’ve read it too. It’s dated, and some more recent stuff has updated and replaced individual chapters, but the book still shines and is at times laugh-out-loud funny. I can see teaching the chapters on “Why Doom Rules” and “A La Recherhce du [sic] Arcades Perdu” — which (unfortunately) does not riff off of Benjamin and Proust nearly as much as it should.
_Everything Bad For You Is Good For You, Steve Johnson_
Steve Johnson took my money _again_. I read his _Emergence_ at the same time I read _Linked_ — a similar book written by a scientist who studies science. I didn’t understand at the time why Johnson was being so hyped when _Linked_ was so much better. So I picked up _Interface Culture_, the first book to establish him as a popular science writer during the internet boom. I disliked intensely. I swore he wouldn’t get any more of my money. However, _Everything Bad_ has a section on video games, it was favorably reviewed in the New Yorker and other such forums, I thought I might be able to teach it, and the only library in Honolulu that has it has it checked out and waitlisted. So I paid my money and read it on the plane. Don’t bother. _Everything Bad For You_ is bad for you. Steve Johnson took my money _again_.
_In Praise of Theory, Hans-Georg Gadamer_
I was going to take along _The Enigma of Health_ but took this instead. It’s a collection of the essays in which Gadamer articulates most clearly his diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity. Unfortunately Gadamer — a philosopher who once admitted that he “only read books at least a thousand years old” and who was almost late to his own dissertation defense because his coat has frozen to the door of his rural, unheated house — is not at his best here. There isn’t any original social diagnosis, and from the point of view of an American who grew up with electricty his rural German suspicion of technology seems naive. Even the artle on the philosophical relevance of the hand to modernity — which could be great — is disappointing. So no, this is not Gadamer’s strongest work — at least not he essays I read.
I’m off to China for a month and have no idea whether I’ll blog the trip or not. Given the length of the trip (crossing the Pacific is _suck_) I’ve been busy planning my reading list. I’ve been aided by a recent library sale as well as one of the local bookstores in town going out of business. I really want to take more but I know that is my Bibliophile OCD talking. The plan is to ditch most of the books as I am done reading them so as to lighten my load as I travel. Here is what I am planning to take with me:
_The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir_
I am having a rapprochement with existentialism. Or at least a cease-fire. Any way it cost US$.25.
_Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, M.I. Finley_
It’s always a good idea to read more Fnley, especially if you are also reading…
_The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald_
Its been a decade. Time to come home.
_We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Philip Gourevitch_
I didn’t see the movie — the least I can do is read the book.
_The Gold Coast, Kim Stanley Robinson_
I’ve never read anything by him. Don’t care about Mars, do care about California.
_Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman_
Another novelist I’ve never read.
_A Signal Shattered, Eric Nylund_
ANOTHER novelist I’ve never read. Must keep up with the sci-fi world.
_Melal, Robert Barclay_
Honolulu is to Micronesia as Auckland is to the Pacific. You walk around here and and people are shocked you call yourself cosmopolitcan and have never been to Kosrae. Melal is widely-read and -taught. Consider it remedial Micronesia reading.
_Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree, Albert Wendt_
Generally considered one of the greatest novelists the Pacific Islands has produced, I see Al Wendt at tons of events in Honolulu and have never read anything by him. Remedial Pacific fiction reading. Sometimes I wish I liked reading Pacific fiction more than I liked playing GTA.
_Guests Of The Sheik, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea_
Classic ethnography for intro courses. Will teach in fall. Particularly apropos for students connected to the military here in Honolulu.
_Eon, Greg Bear_
I saw Greg Bear speak once at LISA and thought he was fascinating. I read _Darwin’s Radio_ and was incredibly disappointed. I’m giving him another shot.
_Consider Phlebas, Iain Banks_
I used to really love Iain Banks and if I ever teach my ‘first contact in sci-fi’ course _Excession_ will be on the syllabus. But lately the culture novels seem ‘undisciplined’ rather than ‘inventive’ to me. We’ll see how it goes.
In a strange and yet typical twist of internetdom, an “ancient post of mine”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=50 has become the home of a small but growing community of people desperately seeking the lyrics of Vivaldi’s lovely motet “Nulla in munda pax sincera” (known to most people as the theme song from the movie ‘Shine’). I often wonder what Vivaldi would think if he knew that today his piece evokes in the minds of most listeners the image of a middle-aged Australian man bouncing up and down on a trampoline wearing nothing but a raincoat. At any rate to make the world a better place here they are:
Aria:
Nulla in mundo pax sincera
Sine felle; pura et vera
Dulce Jesu, soia spe
Inter poenas et tormenta
Vivit anima contenta
Cast amoris, soia spe
Recit:
Blando coloere oculos mundus decipit
et occulto vulnere corda conficit.
Fugiamus ridentem
vitemus sequentem
has delicias ostentando;
arta secura vellet ludendo superare.
Aria:
Spirat anguis inter flores
Et colores explicando tegit fei.
Spirat anuis, sed tegit fei.
Sed occulto factus ore
Homo demens in amore
Saepe lambit quasi mei.
Alleluia.
Which means:
There is no true peace in the world without bitterness; in you, sweet Jesus, it is pure and rightful.
Amongst teh anguish and torment lives the contented soul, is only hope, chaste love.
The world beguiles our eyes with alluring colors and consumes our hearts with hidden wounds. When it laughs, let us flee from it; when it pursues us, flanting its delights, let us shun it; for by carefree conduct and amusements, it would over come us.
The serpent slithers through flowers, and whilst it shows the beauty of it colors it conceals its venom. The serpent slithers, but it concelas its venom. But he who is dumbstruck and insance with love, will often lick it as if it were honey.
Alleluia.
There. Never say I never gave you anything.
“Trace Elements”:http://tracelements.blogspot.com/ is blogging the Guns Control Summit being held in PNG. For the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE someone is actually blogging a conference I actually want to read about! I hope he’ll keep it up. The information is valuable — he links to a report on “guns in the Southern Highlands”:http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/Special%20Reports/SR%20PNG.pdf (138 page 827K PDF). It often seems to me that a lot of the reporting on this is so simplistic as to be useless. I remember a report on the small arms trade in Melanesia based on very little research, for instance, and some people still seem to believe that guns are coming across the border from Irian instead — as it transparently obvious to anyone who has lived in areas where they’re used — from ‘capacity building’ stockpiles in Port Moresby funded by foreign donors. Still, any information is good information on this topic and I look forward to reading more.
Once again, it turns out that “Nike is trying to take punk rock away from the kids”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/nikes_major_lift.php. Ian Mackay has been active in copyright reform stuff over the years — in fact I bet a lot of people who are interested in copyright reform have an elective affinity for it based on their previous experience with indie rock, the DIY ethos, etc. etc. I know I do. At the same time he’s always been very concerned that the people who buy stuff from Dischord do right by Dischord, since it works so hard to do right by them — Dischord doesn’t give their recordings away for free or use CC licensing. They appreciate the importance of reform in the music industry, but still rely on their ‘brand’.
Frankly even though Nike apologized, I still think Mackay should give them their seven dollars back and tell them to get out of the club.
My Scarily Erudite Beloved and I met in choir. Between the two of us, we have a total of over four decades of singing experience. Our guest list includes not only a choir’s worth of people — and I mean _real singers_ — a conductor, and an accompanist. So far, the only thing we’ve really spent time thinking about our wedding plans is what music we’ll have. I’m shooting for a full 40 minutes at least — a real concert’s worth of music.
But what will be sung? This question is complicated by the fact that a lot of choral music is about the false god of the Christians, and wouldn’t be appropriate for our wedding. For some things — Sicut Cervus, for instance — we can make exceptions, since they are basically covers of Hebrew psalms in the first place (and our singers all already know Sicut Cervus by heart). We are looking in to Eric Whitacre’s 5 Hebrew Love Songs (we’d cheat and have the piano rehearsal accompaniment playing instead of the string quartet) — except not the embarassing middle movement with the Israeli tambourine thang. The ‘Hinei Matov’ movement from the Chichester Psalms was also recommended to us, as was Pinkham’s Wedding Cantata, except that the SEB does not really take a shine to the wedding cantata. We thought about a movement from Palestrina’s setting of the Song of Songs like “Nigra Sum Sed Formosa,” but the SEB summarily vetoed it when I, mindful of the Becky Barnett character from Boogie Nights, agreed we could do it, but only if we listed it on the program as “Chocolate Love.”
Finally we both agreed that William Walton’s “Set Me As A Seal Upon Thy Heart” would be perfectly appropriate, and I suggested that she listen to the recording of Walton’s choral music “with the castle on it” which I thought was the best one. It turns out that there are two such recordings (which feature churches and colleges and not actually castles) — one with the Finzi Singers and one directed by Christopher Robinson. Then we got into a big debate over which recording was which, which came out on Chandos, etc. etc. Finally the debate was solved or, more accurately, brought to a sudden halt, when googling around on Amazon for the recordings let to the discovery of a DVD entitled “Lambchop’s Passover and Hannukah Surprise”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006JDRE/ref=cm_bg_d_18/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance. Like a trainwreck, we were “horrified”:http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00006JDRE.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg. And yet could not turn ourselves away. The difference between a train wreck and Lambchop’s Passover and Hannukah Surprise, however, is that 1) you can not next-day-air a trainwreck to your door and 2) I have never seen a 5 star review of a train wreck before.
The upshot of this is that the Walton is probably on for the wedding, regardless of which recorded version each of us prefers. As for the rest of the program, well, we’ll just have to finalize it _after_ our DVD arrives to make sure there isn’t a hilarious sock-puppet based number we want to incorporate into our nuptials.
*Update:* You must all read “Katie Rains Amazon Review”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3NI7FDALIDFT4/ref=cm_aya_rev_more/002-3949094-5952040?%5Fencoding=UTF8 of “Hannukah on Planet Matzah Ball”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B0000VLA6W/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/002-3949094-5952040?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=dvd: “The movie starts with aliens on planet Matzah who found out they were jewish and who begin to chant ‘we are jewish! we are jewish!’ like it was some crazy cult. Then out of space comes this menorah that falls into their spaceship….” It just gets better from there. Although to be fair another reviewer notes “The singing dreidyl is also annoying, but I can tolerate that part.”
Google News recently showed me the new Pope’s official “address to the Bishops of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands”:http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=73242. It turns out that “Jesus Christ continues to draw the peoples of their two island nations to a still deeper faith and life in him.”
“George”:http://allaboutgeorge.typepad.com/ points to “this British color story”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1658941,00.html, wherein Oboe d’amour is _not_ a reference to an instrument used in early music. It’s a little gratuitous, but not as untrue as you might think.
It does raise the question, though, why we don’t seem to mind the idea of romantic hookups shaping the course of rock and roll bands’ careers but we consider the casting couch in classical music to somehow be more morally problematical. Also, it makes my life as a chorister seem unbelievably dull.
“Bomana Nights”:http://bomana.blogspot.com/ has some “excellent pictures”:http://bomana.blogspot.com/2005/06/line-up.html (this post and the ones one either side of it) of the line up for one of PNG’s beauty pageant/fund raisers — I believe this is one of the run-ups to Miss PNG. When I was in PNG I actually _knew_ the woman who won one year. The way this genre of contest has been customized in PNG is just so typical of the country, and the pictures are so evocative of a sort of middle-class semi-urban existence (if Bombex counts as semi-urban!) life style that you so rarely read about in ethnographies of PNG, but which I and so many other people remember so fondly.
“Steve”:http://www.onepotmeal.com/ has “won the 60 second story competition”:http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/06/14/and-the-winner-is/. Gratz to him. Do you know why he won? Because _Steve writes really well_. He deserved to win, that’s why. Yeah Steve!
“Joel”:http://searchforlove.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_searchforlove_archive.html#200168801 writes:
Today I spent seven hours in church. Tomorrow I will spend five hours in church. Sunday I will spend another seven hours in church. This week (Holy Week) is the only time during the year that I feel uncomfortable, as a Jew, singing in a church choir. When the congregation pretends to be the Jews and sings “Crucify him!” en masse it’s hard not to feel a little, well, on edge.
And everybody gets so upset when I stand up in the middle of the service and shriek, “Your god is a lie!”
I mean, I’m just saying.
/me raises fist in show of solidarity
Today on Amazon.com trying to track down the citation for “In The Name of Hawai’ians”:http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/halualani_in.html I discovered that “Noenoe Silva”:http://www.politicalscience.hawaii.edu/Faculty/silva/nsilva.htm has an “amazon profile”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/clm/ref=cm_aya_ac_addfriend/002-3949094-5952040?form-customer-links=A3V8M4YZ7J4U86&cl.A3V8M4YZ7J4U86=favorite-member&result-template=tg/cm/member-glance/-/A3V8M4YZ7J4U86. It’s somewhat brief (although there is a very decent list on “Hawai’i by Hawai’ians: Beyond Tourist Propoganda”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/PKDX9GDGTVXW/ref=cm_aya_lm_title.more/002-3949094-5952040). What struck me about it was her nickname — Noe1893. I am all for academic geekdom, but somehow this just struck me as a little off. Kind of like me making my amazon nickname ‘rexkristallnacht’ or something more mild but equally reminiscent of politically and ethnic disaster. Maybe it’s meant to remind people they should never forget “what happened in 1893″:http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_041000_hawaiiannexa.htm, and to remember what life was like in the islands in the 1,893 years _before_ the white guys took over? Hard to tell. The very fact that I saw ‘noe1893′ and immediately realized who it was and what 1893 meant clearly indicates I myself am rapidly becoming an Annexation Geek.
1) I’m defending my dissertation in a week. The “precis”:http://alex.golub.name/diss/golub_diss_precis.pdf is available if you want to check it out.
2) I’m _finally_ getting around to getting my “Semiotic Technologies posts”:http://digitalgenres.org/?p=20 at the DGI up and running.
Reed’s Dean of Admissions discusses what his institution will “do about the new SAT”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/05/25/marthers. I had a chance to visit the school a few weeks ago at the same time as Ward Churchill and asked a few students about it. Their take on Churchill was insightful and very in keeping with the school’s distinctive outlook (“he didn’t let us ask questions” glowered one student). The profs and the students both get credit for creating great students, but let’s not forget the guys who decide who will be showing up for Orientation Week as well. It’s an interesting essay about how a school that is (as I used to say in computing) “known-working” deals with standardized tests.
(disclosure: I’m an alumn)
The latest PNG-related newsclipping is upon us (thanks “George”:http://www.allaboutgeorge.com/). In the world network of aviation, “Wasu in PNG is on one end”:http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050523/ap_on_re_us/airline_connections_1. On the other hand, Jacksons in Port Moresby is the seventh most hub-like airport in the world, beating out Frankfurt and Tokyo. Airports in PNG are wonderful and sometimes very strange places. I’ve flown from Port Moresby to Honiara, admired the bintillions of small national airlines in Singapore that shared space with Air Niugini (Air Seychelles, anyone?), and gone in and out of Wewak, Goroka, Hagen, Alotau, Misima, and Kairik. There are literally ten books written about aviation in Papua New Guinea and for good reason. Whether it’s the little cups of orange juice and the all-strings arrangement of Here Comes The Sun that they play at the beginning of all international flights, or the fifteen Huli guys on the flight to Lae who drink complimentary coke continuously until the plane lands, something interesting always seems to happen at PNG airports. I miss it.
Paul Ricoeur is dead. I’ve posted more details over at “Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/2005/05/21/paul-ricoeur-is-dead/.
“Bill Maurer”:http://www.anthro.uci.edu/html/People/Fac%20Bios/Maurer.html (“CV”:http://www.anthro.uci.edu/html/People/Fac%20Bios/Fac%20Pubs%20PDFs/MaurerCV-July2004.pdf) has a new book out on “Muslim banking”:http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7998.html that is well-positioned in several ways.
A quick bibliographic note on the noble savage: “The Myth of the Ecologically Noble Savage”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/102-6229466-0987309 and “Constant Battles”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312310897/qid=1116374262/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance&s=books&n=507846. The last one might not be NPOV. “Wild in the Woods”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0255364474/qid=1116374262/sr=8-7/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i7_xgl14/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 is _definitely_ POV. I mention it because it’s cool that you can by it for US$20 from Amazon or “download the PDF”:http://www.iea.org.uk/files/upld-publication46pdf?.pdf from the original scary British free-market website which spawned it.
I’d also like to now for the record that if you search Amazon.com for “Myth of The Noble Savage” you only have to go down to the sixth item before you encounter a book under its sway, rather than debunking it.
I am pleased to announce the launch of a new website entitled “Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/. It’s an anthropology group blog which I am a contributor to. I’m excited because the site looks great thanks to Kerim’s hard work (and yes, those _are_ pensée sauvage on the masthead) and the entries — which now number up to a grand total of five! — have so far been very impressive. And I’m not just saying that because almost half of them are by me. Really, I am looking forward to seeing Savage Minds grow, and I hope that in the future it will gain the wide readership it deserves. Please do “check it out”:http://savageminds.org/ if you’re interested.
If you’re not interested, and don’t care one wit about anthropology, and just want more Anne Kawharu fan fiction, then stay tuned here — now that I’m contributing professionally to Savage Minds, this blog will now revert to random recipes and lightsaber fighting.
I don’t know what strange synergy sparked this, but in fact yes, I have been obsessively reading both “Ant and Idea”:http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/ant_idea/index.html _and_ “Edison Hate Future”:http://www.warrenellis.com/index.php?cat=31.
I spent a couple of years of my life working more or less full-time in computing — mostly in the unglamorous job of desktop support. This occasionally resulted in me being given unrestricted access to the computers, offices, and apartments of several famous professors and administrators. I was granted access to this sort of thing because people respected my candor and — mostly — because they really really needed their email fixed immediately. So officially I don’t remember anything about the database containing the annual incomes for every professor in the division. Still, “this seems right to me”:http://insidehighered.com/careers/2005/04/25/pay (scroll down for the straight up dollar amounts).
Like many academic bloggers I’ve been reading the beta of Inside Higher Ed for sometime. However I’ve been hampered by their lack of an RSS feed. I head it’s coming soon, and when it does I’m sure you’ll hear a lot more about the site from many of us — so far it looks pretty decent.
“Kerim”:http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2005/05/13/david-graeber/ and “Biella ‘m4dd0g’ Coleman”:http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/archives/000744.html#000744 have already publicized “what Yale is doing to David Graeber”:http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=7834 so I won’t repeat it here. I haven’t read “his book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312240457/qid=1116118035/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/102-6229466-0987309 but I have met David and remember him as funny, articulate, and approachable. What is more, he is also amazingly erudite — an example of the sort of deeply-learned and thoughtful scholar that Chicago Anthroplogy prides itself on. He really _is_ familiar with everything from Mauss to Aristotle to Bakhtin.
I haven’t been very vocal about this because I am at such a remove from Yale, I know that students often have high hopes that popular professors stay even if it’s not structurally feasible, and that Ivy Leagues tend not to retain junior faculty. While my initial cynicism may have worked to block my natural feelings of collegiality with David — we overlapped at Chicago and share the same dissertation supervisor — “this article at counterpunch”:http://www.counterpunch.org/frank05132005.html is, I have to say, pretty damning. The picture he paints of the department seems very probable to me based on my knowledge of departmental politics and really puts Yale in a very bad light indeed.
I am for sure signing the petition.
On the other hand, David is definitely crossing the Rubicon by speaking publically about the nature of the department in public. I don’t think it’s a smart play and I’m shocked at his frankness about topics that are not meant for public consumption. Not that I think he’s wrong or lying, just that saying this in public is probably only going to make the task of getting settled at Yale (if that’s still his goal) even more difficult. I mean — given his estimates of ‘bullies’ to ‘bad guys’ in the department, and the presence of the “departmental faculty list”:http://yale.edu/academics/departments.html and you can more or less figure out who he is speaking ill of if you know a little about the personalities involved.
Which brings me to another thing — in the interview David argues his problems are part of a wider trend in what he calls the shift from the ‘neoliberal university’ to the ‘imperial university’. I don’t think that is true at all. I think that what is happening to him is a manifestation of university politics that are as old as tenure itself — the hot-house atmosphere of an institution with life-long appointments and a small-world network (I’m too polite to say “old boy’s club”) ditching someone who is making waves. What _has_ changed is the mechanisms that David has for redressing this — the global organization of scholars connected by digital genres like petitions, email, webpages, online magazines, the departmental webpage to see who he is dissing, etc.
As a young almost-graduated academic I certainly feel for David, and I hope that he finds an appointment at an institution which will allow him to develop what is already a very interested intellectual trajectory.
Every years or so I trawl the blogosphere for PNG-related websites. Unfortunately, they tend to be either ephemeral or not that helpful or forums and (for some reason) me hates to use forums. However, my blog recently got pinged by the mind behind “PNG life”:http://pnglife.blogspot.com/ and hence blogrolled over to “Sepik Mom”:http://www.sepikmom.com/ and “Bomana Nights”:http://bomana.blogspot.com/. Blogspot changes the world in yet another small and slightly unexpected way.
Only a century or two late, but we’ve finally managed to “track down La Perouse”:http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2005/05/10/explorer-wreck050510.html. Crazy daisy.
The new Cultural Anthropology is out, and it includes two worthwhile looking articles (not read them yet) by “Bill Bissel”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/can.2005.20.2.215?cookieSet=1 and “Chris Kelty”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/can.2005.20.2.185 (or, as I like to call him, the _K-Dawg_)
Bill is another Chicago alumn. I have never met him. But there was a guy I used to see at the local bar in Hyde Park who I thought was him even though he wasn’t. He was a mean guy and would get drunk and punch me on the arm real hard. So I have a negative feeling about the _real_ Bill Bissell, even though I’ve never met him. Since I’m interested in Colonial Nostalgia I’m hoping that once I meet the True Bissell then my unhappy memories of Bissell The Pretender will evaporate.
Give it up to the K-Dawg. If you feel particularly enthused, I encourage you to raise the roof. But only if you really want to.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Weber recently, mostly because of recent spats on wikipedia as well as forumlating the main ideas of my dissertation through his writings on bureaucracy and why it doesn’t work so well in Papua New Guinea. So I was gratified to run across this “post on Weber and subjective attitudes towards bureaucracy”:http://meglav.blogspot.com/2005/05/todays-project-finagling-foucault.html over at “Safe Space”:http://meglav.blogspot.com/. Once you reach a certain point of reading Weber the difficulty is no longer working through the prose or ideas (if you’re not there yet, stick with it — it’s worth it) so much as trying to convince others that your take on his opus hangs together. This is why Weber (unlike, say, Durkheim) is really a figure you can’t engage with deeply without really digging into the secondary literature on him. And by this I don’t mean secondary sources that explain ‘what Weber said’ but the historical and exegetical tradition around the man. So it is nice to find a secondary source that touches so closely on this! Thank, M.
I just updated to “Wordpress 1.5.1″:http://wordpress.org/development/2005/05/one-five-one/. Since this is a minor upgrade if anything is broken it is definitely my fault. You can upgrade too if you like.
Man it is amazing what a few nights of actual sleep and no stress will do for a person. This whole ‘finishing the dissertation’ thing was _such_ a good idea. Here are a few quick links:
‘Borderline’ because that’s kinder than ‘kooky’ or ‘weirdo’. It’s not that these institutions _aren’t_ organized by genuine anthropologists of genuine departments. It’s just that they’re either 1) “part of a ‘movement’”:http://www.perey-anthropology.net/ whose wikipedia entry’s neutrality is considered “‘contested’”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic_realism or 2) they’re not so much an “international institute”:http://www.iianthropology.org/ as they are just ‘Bulgarian’.
Two cool things. First: fellow UofC alumn “Marc ‘Fertilizer Has Brought Poison’ Auslander has a blog”:http://www.bjournals.com/users/mausland/ over at Brandeis, where he teaches. Second: “everybody at Brandeis has (or could have) a blog”:http://www.bjournals.com/ thanks to the ginormous LiveJournal install that the computer users group has got over there. That is awesome. I wonder if the amount of XFiles fan fic at Brandeis will now mysteriously start to grow…?
I know that, as a convert, I am already preaching to the converted. But still. At the end of my first day of work after my dissertation — catching up on correspondence, blog design, making graphics, etc — I don’t think I ever touched a piece of software (other than the OS) that was not either free as in beer or free as in speech or both. Professional design people etc. need professional programs and so forth, but for most of us Open Source or Free As In Beer Software really eliminates the need to buy anything. Consider:
Office Productivity: Open Office
Email: Thunderbird
Browser: FireFox
Coding/text editor: Notepad++
SVG Graphics: Inkspot
Photoshop: GIMP
Photo organizing: Picasa2 (there are a multitude but that’s what I use)
Music: WinAMP (steadily getting lamer, but still around), AudioGrabber
SFTP: Fillezilla
SSH: Putty
Half Life 2: Ok I’m still working on finding a replacement for this one
And then the webservices! I think today I used flickr, bloglines, rojo, del.icio.us, CiteULike, amazon, scholar.google.com, wordpress, wikipedia… it’s enough to make your head spin.
This isn’t news, I’m well aware. But, I don’t know… today it just hit me how little point there is in buying software applications anymore.